Built and sumptuously decorated by Arezzo-born painter, architect and art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), this museum is where Vasari lived and worked, and where the original manuscript of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) – still in print under the title The Lives of the Artists – is kept. End on the bijou, Renaissance-style roof garden with flower beds, box hedges and a fountain in its centre. To access the museum, ring the bell.
The most important room in this Mannerist residence is the Sala della Virtu (Room of Virtue), which Vasari decorated in 1548 while writing Lives. It features episodes in the lives of the most famous painters of antiquity.
Vasari's contemporaries are celebrated in the Camera della Fama con le Quatttro Arti (Room of Fame and the Four Arts), where the seven portraits include Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto and – in a display of hubris – Vasari himself.