Pinacoteca di Vasto

The Vasto Picture Gallery occupies part of Palazzo d'Avalos and centres on works donated by the Palizzi family in 1898. The collection traces nineteenth-century Italian painting through landscape, realism and the artists' connections with Naples and Paris.

Why it matters

Giuseppe, Filippo, Nicola and Francesco Paolo Palizzi trained in Naples after leaving Vasto. Their donation established the core of the civic gallery and brought works by a family whose art participated in the renewal of nineteenth-century landscape painting.

What to notice

Filippo Palizzi's Due Pastorelli, Olanda and Muletto show his close observation of animals and rural life. Francesco Paolo Palizzi is represented by a pencil study of a donkey. Works by Gabriele Smargiassi, Francesco Paolo Michetti and Giulio Aristide Sartorio broaden the collection's view of landscape and later Italian painting.

Context and history

Vasto began forming a public antiquarium and museum in the mid-nineteenth century. The picture gallery developed around the Palizzi donation of 1898 and is housed in the first-floor apartments of Palazzo d'Avalos. After long periods of closure in the later twentieth century, it reopened in 1999 as part of the palace's civic museum circuit.