The Opificio delle Pietre Dure [“Semiprecious Stone Works”] is an ancient Florentine institution currently active in safeguarding the city’s artistic heritage, it was originally an aristocratic workshop for semiprecious stones. The Opificio’s long history, still evoked today in the name it bears and in the Museum housed in an eighteenth-century building in Via degli Alfani, begins in 1588, when Grand-Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici decided to unite all the artistic workshops in the employ of the court and lodging in the Uffizi, in a single “state works” that would place the refined skills of its craftsmen and the inventiveness of its artists in the exclusive service of the Grand Duke’s patronage. One major stimulus for this undertaking – which was unusual for the time but later copied by other European sovereigns, including Louis XIV of France in the creation of the Gobelins – was the grandiose project of the Medici Chapel, the gigantic mausoleum for the Florentine dynasty, entirely covered in semiprecious stone [pietre dure] and thus requiring enormous financial and organizational resources for its realization.

From the start the “Gallery dei Lavori,” as the Opificio was called at the time, was also devoted to the creation of stately furnishings in semiprecious stone for the grand-ducal residences and the various European courts to which the Medicis would send these magnanimous gifts as prestigious “calling cards” from the little Grand Duchy of Tuscany. So admired was the craftsmanship, and so solid its international renown, that even after the Grand Duchy was passed onto the Lorraine dynasty in 1737, the Opificio continued its brilliant activity up to the end of the nineteenth century, when, after three centuries of uninterrupted good fortune, the mosaics and semiprecious stone inlays of the glorious Medicean institution had to give way to new social and political realities. In the recently united Kingdom of Italy, Florence no longer had a court that could patronize production, and although the new bourgeois classes of the late nineteenth centuries admired the costly works of the Opificio, they would not buy them.

This was when the change that would propel the Opificio into the new century – and eventually into the new millennium – occurred. The ancient wealth of skills and technique became divorced from artistic creation and dedicated to the new, demanding sphere of restoring the national artistic heritage.

In 1975, with the establishment of the new Ministero per i Beni Culturali, the Opificio expanded its original horizons as a laboratory for the restoration of stone and mosaics and became a great center with twelve different restoration departments (painting, wall painting, wood sculpture, terra cotta, goldwork, bronze, mosaics and semiprecious stone, stonework, tapestry, textiles, paper, and archaelogical materials). Moreover, it was endowed with its own scientific laboratory for supporting and orienting conservation, as well as a Scuola di Alta Formazione [Specialization Institute] which, together with the school of the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome, sees to the training of restorers for the Ministero per i Beni e Attività Culturali. Every year the Scuola holds a competition for fifteen new student positions distributed throughout the different specialized departments of the Opificio. Students complete a four-year educational program that involves courses in theory as well as laboratory practice. Recently the School for the Restoration of Mosaics at the Soprintendenza of Ravenna became a separate chapter of the Opificio’s Scuola.