Home›featured›Let's discover the "Museo Novecento" in Florence

Let's discover the "Museo Novecento" in Florence

October 12, 2022

The "Museo Novecento" in Florence represents a dream started from an idea of Professor Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti who, following the 1966 flood, invited Italian and foreign artists and collectors to donate a work to the city of Florence to compensate, with modern art, the damage that the flood had caused to the artistic heritage of Our city.

Many Italian and international artists responded, including Lucio Fontana, Emilio Vedova, Ottone Rosai, Marino Marini, Luciano Berti, but certainly the largest number of works arrived in 1970 when the engineer Alberto della Ragione donated his Collection of 241 Works of artists such as Renato Guttuso, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, De Pisis, Giorgio Morandi and many others who, since 1942, had started attending the Galleria Spiga in Milan, opened by the engineer to give talented young artists the opportunity to exhibit their works.

Finally, the idea of creating a Museum of Contemporary Art took shape in 2014, the year in which the Museum was opened to the public inside the suggestive Ospedale di San Paolo dei Convalescenti, which overlooks, with its fifteenth-century portico by architect Michelozzo, Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, right in front of the facade of the basilica of the same name. Here, on the second floor, you can admire the entire "Alberto della Ragione" collection and part of the other donations, divided by Artistic themes.

Since 2018, with the new direction entrusted to the Art Historian Sergio Risaliti, the Museum has become a dynamic center of contemporary art as the rooms on the ground floor and on the first floor regularly host exhibitions of international contemporary artists, according to a concept of "Museo diffuso" (widespread museum) which also involves historical exhibition sites in Florence such as Piazza Signoria, the rooms of Palazzo Vecchio, of Forte Belvedere, of the Museum of San Marco and many others, in the search for a continuous dialogue between ancient and contemporary.