MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna

Bologna baked its bread where it now hangs its modern art. MAMbo, the city's civic museum of modern art since 2007, fills the former municipal bread factory in the Manifattura delle Arti district with post-war Italian painting and performance history — plus the largest public collection anywhere devoted to Giorgio Morandi.

Why it matters

MAMbo is the contemporary end of Bologna's civic museum system, Istituzione Bologna Musei, and its building is part of the show: the museum occupies the former Forno del Pane, the city bread factory, recycled in the Manifattura delle Arti urban project that turned a production belt of slaughterhouse, tobacco factory and salt warehouse into a cultural district. The museum's collection and exhibitions trace Italian art from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present. Its history includes the Settimane Internazionali della Performance of 1977 to 1982; the first edition gathered forty-nine artists, among them Marina Abramović and Ulay, who staged Imponderabilia here. Above all, MAMbo houses the Museo Morandi, whose more than two hundred and fifty paintings, watercolours, drawings and etchings make the largest public Morandi collection in the world, including the still lifes and the Fiori of 1950 with which he closed his career.

What to notice

The Morandi rooms document the painter's development as a master of still life, with bottles, vases and boxes repeated across decades. Works include Natura morta and the 1950 Fiori, for which Morandi used dried and silk flowers rather than fresh ones. The contemporary collection includes Francesco Vezzoli's Homage to the Hollywood Squares, featuring Bridget Riley, a tapestry that combines optical painting with Anni Albers's weaving. The 1977 performance festival is documented as part of the museum's history. Nearby institutions include the Cineteca in the former slaughterhouse and the Cassero in the former Salara.

Context and history

MAMbo descends from the Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, which opened spaces designed by artist-architect Leone Pancaldi at Piazza della Costituzione in 1975 after a decade of exhibitions under the banner "Un Museo Oggi". The GAM era fed the new museum its identity — avant-garde presentation alongside re-readings of Italian and international art history, performance weeks and the young-artists platform of Villa delle Rose. The move to the bread factory came with the Manifattura delle Arti recovery programme, which also gave the district its university campus in the former Manifattura Tabacchi and the Cineteca in the former macello; the museum opened in its new home in 2007, and since 2012 the Morandi collection has been shown here, in the district near the house in Via Fondazza where the painter lived and worked. The museum's mission includes cultural production and education.