📍Via Roma 38, 57126 Livorno, Italy
1884 – 1902“I was born in this house in Livorno, the Tuscan port city, in July 1884, just as bailiffs were carrying off my family's possessions. My father's business had failed, but an old law said that creditors could not take the bed of a woman about to give birth, so my family piled their most precious belongings on my mother's bed. My mother, Eugénie Garsin, came from a cultured Sephardic Jewish family from Marseille, and she raised me, the youngest of four, in a home full of books, languages and ideas. My grandfather Isaac Garsin lived with us. He was intellectual, passionate about history and philosophy and an excellent chess player, and he walked with me around Livorno, talking about ideas and taking me on my first visits to museums. My mother ran a small school and translated to support us, and she kept a diary in which she wrote of her spoiled, rather capricious little son. I fell gravely ill as a boy, and in my fever I told her I wanted to be a painter. When I recovered, she arranged for me to study with Guglielmo Micheli in Livorno. In Micheli's studio I drew and painted with other young artists, and I absorbed the art of the Tuscan masters. When illness struck again, my mother took me south to Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi, and then north to Florence and Venice, where I saw the great art of Italy and fell in love with sculpture. In 1906 I left for Paris, where I made my portraits with their long faces and almond eyes. Livorno is proud of me now, and the house where I was born has become the Casa Natale Amedeo Modigliani museum.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today