The National Museum of Palazzo Mansi, a true museum-residence, constitutes an exemplary document of the homes of the Lucca merchants. Transformed at the end of the 17th century by the Mansi family, who owned it, into a representative palace and set up according to the prevailing Baroque taste, it is now an important example of a "museum within a museum". In the rooms of this typical Lucca residence, which preserves much of the original furnishings and a precious cycle of Brussels tapestries, the Art Gallery is housed with paintings from Italian and non-Italian schools from the 16th to the 18th century. On the second floor, there are sections dedicated to the 19th and 20th centuries, and in the rooms that housed the palace kitchens, the Rustic Weaving Workshop Maria Niemack is located, displaying eighteenth and nineteenth-century looms and tools. The Palace encapsulates the centuries-old history of the eponymous family which, starting from the 16th century, was able to diversify its interests by combining traditional agricultural and land activities with commercial initiatives, significantly increasing economic fortune and social prestige. Of late-sixteenth-century construction, the result of the union of pre-existing tower houses, the palace was purchased in 1616 by Ascanio Mansi. In the renovation commissioned by Raffaello Mansi to the Lucca architect Raffaello Mazzanti and carried out between 1686 and 1691, the interiors of the noble floor were renovated in a sumptuous Baroque style, with frescoes that exalt or in various ways allude to the glory of the family. Other recovery and modernization interventions were carried out by Luigi Mansi in the 18th century. The palace was sold to the State in 1965 and opened as a National Museum in 1977.