Description of the attraction
The Lascari Palace is one of the most curious buildings in Nice. It is located in the very heart of the Old City on the rue Droite, so narrow that it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the beauty of the palace from the street. But inside the tourist is greeted with chic interiors, magnificent frescoes and the Musical Instruments Museum - the second richest collection in France.
Neither the exact year of construction nor the name of the architect of the palace are known. It is only clear that it belongs to the first half of the 17th century and is made in the Italian Baroque style. Until 1802, it was owned by the old noble family of Lascari-Ventimiglia, whose genealogy dates back to the 13th century, when Guillaume-Pierre 1st, Count Ventimiglia, married the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Theodore II Eudokia Lascari. By the end of the 19th century, the palace fell into disrepair, and in 1942 it was bought by the city to create a regional museum of arts and folk traditions here.
The renovation of the palace began only in 1963; the work took seven years. Now its interiors make a strong impression: monumental marble staircases, arcades and galleries decorated with numerous statues, many frescoes with mythological subjects dating back to the middle of the 17th century. In the premises of the palace, Flemish tapestries, furniture of the 17th-18th centuries, and fine stucco are also abundant.
In 1904, industrialist and amateur musician Antoine Gaultier died in Nice, bequeathed to the city his huge collection of musical instruments. The collection was kept successively in different museums and the conservatory of Nice, but in 2001 it was transferred to the Lascari Palace in order to create a museum of musical instruments here. It opened to the public quite recently, in 2011.
Today the collection of the museum includes more than five hundred ancient musical instruments. Among them are such rarities as several viola d'amour of the 17th-18th centuries, William Turner's viola (1652), baroque guitars, including the oldest surviving French guitar from Avignon in 1645, a rare set of clarinets, oriental musical instruments.
There is another unusual object in the Lascari Palace: on the ground floor, a pharmacy has been recreated in the smallest details, which has been here since 1738.
