The National Museum of Palazzo Mansi, a real museum-residence, is an exemplary document of the residences of the Lucca merchants. Transformed at the end of the seventeenth century by the Mansi family, who owned it, into a "representative palace" and set up according to the prevailing Baroque style, today it is an important example of a "museum within a museum". In the rooms of this typical Lucca residence, which retains most of the original furnishings and a precious cycle of Brussels-made tapestries, there is the Pinacoteca with paintings from the Italian and non-Italian schools from the 16th to the 18th century. The sections dedicated to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are set up on the second floor and in the rooms that housed the kitchens of the building is the Maria Niemack rustic weaving workshop, which exhibits nineteenth-twentieth-century looms and tools. The Palace contains the centuries-old history of the family of the same name which, starting from the 16th century, was able to diversify its interests by combining traditional agricultural and land-based activities with commercial initiatives, significantly increasing economic fortune and social prestige. Built in the late sixteenth century, the result of the union of pre-existing tower houses, the building was purchased in 1616 by Ascanio Mansi. In the renovation operation 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 enhance or in various ways allude to the glory of the family . Other recovery and modernization interventions were carried out by Luigi Mansi in the eighteenth century. The palace was sold to the state in 1965 and opened as a national museum in 1977.