Frieze special Walking in to the piano nobile of the Palazzo Magnani Feroni in Florence is like walking backwards in time. These shuttered, gloomy, dusty interiors have the feel of the shambolic home of some eccentric bachelor uncle who locked the door in 1935 and never came back. When Sotheby’s was first called in three years ago, these grand frescoed rooms were serving as a warehouse for the crated-up stock of one of the city’s legendary antiques businesses, that of Salvatore Romano (who died in 1955) and his son Francesco. No one had entered these rooms since Francesco’s death in 1981.
Even during his lifetime, the discreet – even secretive – Salvatore chose to store his treasures in crates and deal directly with European and American institutions and with individuals avidly building their collections of Italian works of art in the 1920s and 1930s.
