Visit to the Luigi Marzoli Arms Museum

Visit to the Luigi Marzoli Arms Museum

The "Luigi Marzoli" Museum of Arms, housed in one of the oldest areas of Brescia Castle, the Mastio Visconteo, houses one of the most valuable European collections of armor and ancient weapons.

Visit: Brescia Castle, Via del Castello 9, 25121 Brescia Italy

The "Luigi Marzoli" Arms Museum offers an exhibition itinerary with 580 pieces of armor and weapons.
It starts with the armor of the fifteenth century, the century of heavy cavalry, in which helmets and armor become a strategic element. It then continues with armor from the sixteenth century, in which offensive tactics change and the construction of moves in battle becomes more and more dynamic, requiring more comfortable and light armor.
Among the rooms of the Museum it is also possible to grasp the social recognition that weapons and armor begin to acquire in public parades, as a reason for ostentation and admiration. Evidence of this is the evocative reconstruction, in the room known as "of the moose", of the two escort squads of the knight, made up of foot soldiers and men who, armed with halberds and ronconi, increase the sense of spectacularity of the whole.
The aesthetic taste never abandons the artisan hand, sometimes even takes precedence over the technical requirements, as in the two parade wheels to which the Luxury Armor Room is dedicated: wheels of which one signed and dated 1563, admirable for the embossed workmanship with golden sections and the refined subject of the Triumph of Bacchus, which make it a true work of art.
The museum itinerary also includes the evocative history of the sword, which from a mixed weapon, a blow and a cut evolves to become a subtle tool for fencing, as documented by the examples shown from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth century, increasingly functional and studied to protect the contender's hand.
Of particular importance is the collection of firearms, made by the most famous cane masters such as the Cominazzo, the Chinelli, the Dafino and the Procurement, which testify to a work of artisan mechanics over the centuries.
For lovers of architecture and ancient art, a visit to the Museum of Arms allows you to appreciate portions of frescos from the Visconti era that gild the rooms of the Mastio. The coexistence of a Roman temple of the 1st century AD, of which the perimeter of the foundations and a broad staircase are visible, create an atmosphere-laden exhibition context.