A collector's picturesque retreat in a tiny town in Puglia, Italy

THE NEW YORK TIMES

By Marella Caraccola

The curator Peter Benson Miller at home in Puglia, lounging on an 18th-century claw-foot Chippendale sofa and surrounded by some of his many objects, including a lamp made from a pineapple-shaped ice bucket. Credit Simon Upton

The art historian and curator Peter Benson Miller was 13 when his parents began taking him to antiques markets and junk shops near their weekend house in Litchfield County, Conn. By the time he moved for good to Italy almost 30 years later, in 2009 — he is now in charge of the exhibition program and special events at the American Academy in Rome — he had amassed a huge number of objects, or, to be precise, collections of objects: 30 prints depicting Mary, Queen of Scots (‘‘I am attracted to the history of English female martyrs,’’ he says).... He had hundreds of pieces in storage, and several hundred more jammed into the rented apartment in central Rome he shared with his partner, Giovanni Panebianco, a civil servant. [More]