Frederick Stibbert (9 November 1838 – 10 April 1906) was an English art collector and businessman, although he was born in Italy. His figure is mainly linked to the work to which he dedicated his entire life, the Stibbert Museum, gathering a collection of the most disparate genres of art and applied arts, with particular regard to the collection of ancient weapons and armors, among the most conspicuous and important in the world of its kind. His name is also spelled Federigo or Federico Stibbert. Biography Stibbert was born in Florence, but was a British citizen. He was the son of Thomas Stibbert (1771-1847), an English military colonel of the Coldstream Guards, and Giulia Cafaggi (1805-1883), a young Tuscan woman. The Stibbert family was very wealthy, originally from Norfolk: Stibbert's grandfather, Giles Stibbert (1734-1809), was general commander in the East India Company and governor of Bengal. Stibbert received a solid traditional education at Harrow School and Cambridge University. In 1849, after the death of his father, he moved with his mother and his two sisters, Sophronia and Erminia, in the villa of Montughi (the current Stibbert Museum), which his mother bought in 1849. As the last male of the family he inherited all the assets of both his father and his uncles. On 5 December 1861 he was admitted to the Freemasonry in the Florentine Lodge "Concordia", of which he was a full member until 1891, the year in which he became honorary, while continuing to pay his contributions to the Lodge until his death. In 1866 he was a volunteer in the Garibaldi army at Condino, where he gained a silver medal. Stibbert's life was always divided between Florence, where he was born, a city to which he was linked because of his affections and passions, and England, where he studied, a country to which he was bound by his work. Stibbert invested a significant part of his time and money in collecting and designing what is still the Stibbert Museum. In this work of constant collection he initially acted in a rather casual way and was dominated by his own taste (period 1860-1880), but as the museum project took shape he began to make more and more careful purchases and to reorganize the material already in his possession (period 1880-1906). The basic principle that gradually came to mature was to create something educational, especially for young people, aimed