Villa Corsini a Castello was purchased in 1697 due to its proximity to the Medici Villa of Petraia by the Councilor of the Grand Duke Cosimo III de 'Medici, Filippo Corsini, who entrusted the renovation to Giovan Battista Foggini (1652-1725), Grand Ducal architect and sculptor, as well as director of the court manufactories.

Since the late 1980s, Villa Corsini a Castello has housed a deposit of archaeological finds from the Archaeological Superintendence of Tuscany, originally located in the rooms of Palazzo della Crocetta, from where they were removed following the renovation of the museum itinerary after the 1966 flood.

The structure was the subject of a restoration campaign directed by the Superintendence of Environmental and Architectural Heritage of Florence, which began in 2000 with the large hall and the internal courtyard. Some of the most significant marbles from the collection of the Archaeological Museum have been placed in the hall, among which the porphyry statue of the emperor Hadrian , one of a kind, and that of the Peplophoros from Palazzo Cepparello , a splendid replica of the Roman age from an original stand out. Greek of the fifth century. BC Along the walls of the courtyard, on the other hand, there are numerous Etruscan sarcophagi in nenfro from Tuscania, coming from the noble tomb of the Statlane, dating from the end of the 4th to the 2nd century BC. C., in addition to a very valuable female sarcophagus from Tarquinia, decorated in bas-relief with figurative scenes full of symbolic values that allude to saving rites and cults.

In other rooms on the ground floor it was instead decided to recover part of the sumptuous decoration of ancient marble once in the " Ricetto delle Inscriptions" of the Uffizi , set up by Foggini for Cosimo III as a majestic entrance to the Gallery and dismantled by 1920, after alternating set-up phases . On the first floor, the visitor will be able to retrace the millenary history of the Florentine plain through a permanent exhibition of artifacts found in the area.

Among them stand out the remains of the "Tomba della Mula" (late 7th century BC) and funerary sculptures from archaic Fiesole workshops , three of which the exceptional "Cippo di Settimello " (mid 6th century BC). It is important to remember that the exhibition also includes artifacts from the Etruscan city of Gonfienti , discovered over ten years ago not far from Calenzano. The exhibition is aimed not so much at the creation of a museum exhibition in the traditional sense of the term, as at restoring the visibility of the works preserved in this villa, which for years has been serving as a deposit for the stone materials of the National Archaeological Museum of Florence.