The house where he was born
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The house where he was born

The Livorno genius’ home and family

The first stop takes us to the house where Modigliani was born. 

Here, close to his bust statue, we can still find number 38 Via Roma, on the corner of the street, which was the Modigliani family home.

Amedeo Modigliani was born here on 12 July 1884, the last of 4 children. 

His parents were Flaminio Modigliani and Eugenie Garsin. Both families were Jewish business owners. The Garsin family history is particularly interesting, rooted in North Africa, Spain and then Marseilles and lastly Livorno, and Eugenie was proud of the intellectual past of the Sephardic Jews, to which her family belonged: so much so that both she and Amedeo could boast some illustrious ancestors, and also claimed their lineage could be traced back to Spinoza. 

Amedeo's grandfathers and great-grandfathers were involved in the intense trading network that the port of Livorno created with the whole of the Mediterranean area. It was no coincidence that Eugenie Garsin was born in Marseilles and met Flaminio Modigliani in this city. She then moved to Livorno with her husband. 

The building still stands, and has miraculously survived the city’s destruction and industrial transformation. The first floor hosts the “Associazione Casa Natale Amedeo Modigliani”, an association dedicated to Modigliani’s first home and run by Giorgio Guastalla. The association possesses educational and photographic material regarding Amedeo Modigliani’s artistic life and works, from his years in Livorno (1884 - 1906) to his years of artistic maturity in Paris (1906 - 1920, the years of his death) with handwritten documents that are owned by the Archives Légales di Parigi and some original works. 

The house where the great artist was born in on the first floor of a charming nineteenth-century, Livorno Jewish middle-class building. The house is set out as a museum and retraces the artistic and human life of this great Livorno artist through photos, documents, letters and reproductions. The museum itinerary ends with a tribute to the great artist by contemporary painters who donated a number of their works to the museum that were inspired by Modigliani the person and his art. Some of the painters involved were Bruno Ceccobelli, Mario Madiai, Pietro Cascella, Renato Guttuso, Mimmo Rotella, Tano Festa.

The Modigliani family lived at Via Roma 38 in a residential area, in a “quiet district and house full of laughter” as Eugenie Garsin wrote in her diary, alongside other Jewish middle-class families in Livorno. The luxurious villa belonging to the Attias family, one of the must important Livorno Jewish families, was just a few metres from theirs. The name of the square bears witness to this villa”. (source Casanatalemodigliani).

At the same time that Modigliani was born, the family suffered a serious financial problem, that led to the family company collapsing and saw the onset of a time of severe economic difficulty for all three brother (father Flaminio and uncles Alberto and Isacco). 

Eugenie giving birth became a part of history and has also been included in film dedicated to the artist. While his mother was in labour, a bailiff arrived to seize the family’s assets, but an ancient law decreed that he could not touch the bed of a woman giving birth, therefore the family threw as many items as possible on and under Eugenie's bed to save them from being seized. (source https://casanataleamedeomodigliani.com)