Simple house-studio where Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475/1564) lived from 1513 for about fifty years and where he died
It had been made available to him by the Della Rovere family to allow him to complete the project of the tomb of Julius II Della Rovere (1503/13)
The house consisted of two bedrooms, a workshop on the ground floor, a dining room and a cellar. There were also a lodge, stables and a vegetable garden
It was destroyed in 1902 to expand Piazza Venezia during the construction of the Victor Emmanuel II Monument
A plaque on the Palazzo delle Assicurazioni Generali di Venezia commemorates the place where the house-studio was
Michelangelo said that there he lived as a poor man like a spirit bound in a vial, closed in those rooms as the marrow in its bark
The surrounding area, known as Macel de' Corvi, was smelly and unhealthy, because people used it as a dumping ground, to toss carcasses of cats and other animals, and as a latrine, so that Michelangelo himself made a comment in a burlesque sonnet: it seems like all the world doesn't want to shit anywhere else
"The ordinary walls of the house of Macel de' Corvi witnessed the unfolding of an extraordinary life. It was there that the master was struck by the beauty of Tommaso Cavalieri, where I wrote the sonnets or letters to Vittoria Colonna, there he sculpted his marbles, planned churches, domes and squares. Actually, in the house of Macel de' Corvi the gruff Michelangelo did not live alone, but with his bizarre family. He never married and never lived with any of his relatives or grandchildren, who plagued him all his life with their requests for money. His daily life and his love will only be granted to his servant, Francesco di Bernardino aka Urbino - who had no artistic talent and learned nothing living for 26 years next to the greatest artist of all time, but was loved by Michelangelo as a son, allowing him to become not only his servant and assistant, but also the master of the house, and sometimes of himself" (Melania Mazzucco - The Repubblica.it)
Near Porta S. Pancrazio there is, since 1941, the façade of the courtyard of a house rebuilt by Adolfo Pernier that was originally in Via delle Tre Pile on the slopes of the Capitoline Hill and that Pernier himself thought it had been inhabited by Michelangelo during his work on Capitoline Square. Now it is the façade of a cistern functional to the aqueduct of the Acqua Paola
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