The Galleries of Italy in Milan, the Nineteenth Century and Contemporary Art

A guided tour of the treasures of Gallerie d’Italia, in the scenic setting of Milan’s Piazza della Scala. In the spaces of three splendid historic palaces, Palazzo Brentani, Palazzo Anguissola Traversi and the former headquarters of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, hundreds of masterpieces from the 19th and 20th centuries: from Antonio Canova to Segantini and Previati, from Umberto Boccioni to Lucio Fontana, and on to the Neo- and Transavantgarde. The collections gathered in the Gallerie d’Italia, thanks to the collaboration of Fondazione Cariplo and Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, are undoubtedly worth a guided tour, an ideal opportunity to admire their beauty and discover their history.

At Gallerie d’Italia, a journey through the country’s major artistic currents

We arrive at the elegant headquarters of the Gallerie d’Italia, overlooking Piazza della Scala and Via Manzoni, right in the heart of Milan. Our guided tour begins with the section dedicated to the19th century, housed inside Palazzo Anguissola Antona Traversi and Palazzo Brentani, historic buildings of immense architectural value. First masterpiece revealed to our eyes? Canova‘s stunning bas-reliefs, inspired by stories and characters from Greco-Roman antiquity and a perfect example of Italian Neoclassicism. From room to room, the Galleries’ elegant exhibition itinerary continues with many works: a journey between Romanticism and Divisionism, skillfully led by our guides to discover the main protagonists of the major artistic currents of the 19th century, such as Francesco Hayez, Giuseppe Molteni, Gerolamo and Domenico Induno, the masters Macchiaioli, Boldini, Giovanni Segantini and Gaetano Previati. Finally, four masterpieces by Umberto Boccioni, essential for understanding the transition from Divisionism to Futurism and immersing oneself in the experimental and avant-garde atmosphere of twentieth-century art.

The Galleries: from bank to contemporary art museum

The works of the Gallerie d’Italia relating to the last century, the core collection of the so-called Twentieth-Century Yard, instead find space no less than among the ancient counters, surrounded by stucco and polychrome marble, of what was once the Banca Commerciale Italiana, a majestic project by architect Luca Beltrami. The collection includes more than 3,000 works, from the holdings of the various credit institutions that merged into the Intesa Sanpaolo Group and variously repurposed in ever-changing thematic arrangements, in order to ensure their full appreciation. The current exhibition traverses the art of the entire last century, pursuing the idea of “form” and its infinite applications in the making of the work. From Futurism to Fontana‘s Spatialism, through the informal works of Burri and the Milanese Nuclear Movement, we come to the experiments of the Neoavantgardes,Arte Povera, the Pop Art of Schifano and Rotella, and the Transavantgarde of the 1980s and 1990s. A real labyrinth of art, forms and colors, artistic currents and movements in which it would be easy to get lost without the help of a good guide: thanks to his words we will be able to grasp, beyond apparently abstract and strongly conceptual works, meanings, anxieties and hopes of the great authors of the twentieth century.