Rospigliosi Music Collection
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The Rospigliosi Music Collection is a collection of musical documents preserved in two institutions in Pistoia, Italy: the Archive of the Chapter and the Forteguerriana Library.
The collection was, for the most part, collected and organized by Giovan Carlo Rospigliosi (1823–1908), a descendant of the family tree of Pope Clement IX (Giulio Rospigliosi, 1600–1669).[1][2][3][4] He dabbled in voice (a baritone), and following the cultural tendencies of the high-bourgeois of the nineteenth century to furnish private libraries with music to be played in their private salons,[5] he acquired and commissioned various musical pieces (above all songs) to animate the ordinary evenings in his palaces (that of via Ripa del Sale in Pistoia, and the villas of Candeglia in Spicchio and in Gello).[1]
He also collected numerous librettos, single arias and complete works for voice and pianoforte, drawn from the performances of the Teatro dei Risvegliati, to which he was a member.[1][3] His musical possessions were greatly amplified when he integrated his immense patrimony of his family, who became one of the most extravagant patrons of Pistoia from 1635 and on.[1] The remarkable collection, kept organized[7] (three accurate inventories composed by Giovan Carlo exist),[8] remained the property of the descendants of the Rospigliosi family until the 1970s when the priest from Pistoia, Umberto Pineschi, convinced Clemente Rospigliosi to donate the most antique pages to the Archive of the Chapter. The same Clemente, in 1982, decided to donate the rest of the collection to the Town of Pistoia, where it is preserved still today in the Forteguerriana Library.[1][3][4]