Museo del Risorgimento e della Resistenza

The Museum of the Risorgimento and Resistance occupies a wing of Palazzo Laderchi's piano nobile and documents Faenza from about 1790 to 1945, from Napoleon's arrival to the final winter of the Second World War.

Why it matters

The museum collects the documents and memorabilia of Faenza and its territory from about 1790, the year Napoleon's troops reached the city, to 1945, when the fighting of the final war winter ended on the Romagna plain. That span encompasses the transition from papal rule through unification to the twentieth century. Its literary and artistic core records the Risorgimento generation: letters and portraits of Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele II sit beside documentation of Italy's colonial wars and the First World War. The setting doubles the effect, because the exhibition rooms belong to one of Faenza's finest neoclassical interiors, where ceiling frescoes and stucco made for the Laderchi family still set the tone over uniforms, flags and proclamations.

What to notice

The Galleria delle Feste is a vaulted ballroom frescoed by Felice Giani with the stories of Cupid and Psyche and framed by Antonio Trentanove's stuccoes. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century edicts, documents and portraits hang beneath the myth, together with a white marble bust of Napoleon attributed to Raimondo Trentanove. The Astronomy Cabinet, an oval study designed by Giovanni Antonio Antolini, has Giani's Dance of the Hours, planets and zodiac surrounding images of Galileo, Kepler, Tycho and Copernicus. The collection includes a Risorgimento flag, maiolica portraits of Aurelio Saffi and Cavour by Angelo Marabini, and a signed 1900 terracotta bust of Mazzini by Domenico Baccarini. The Saviotti Room contains paintings, weapons and memorabilia of early nineteenth-century Faenza, including portraits of Achille and Francesco Laderchi and a miniature of General Giuseppe Sercognani.

Context and history

Palazzo Laderchi was designed by the Bolognese architect Francesco Tadolini in a sixteenth-century-inspired manner and built from the 1770s, and its fresco and stucco decorations of the 1790s helped carry the Neoclassical style into Romagna. The museum, formally the Museo del Risorgimento e dell'età contemporanea, was assembled by civic passion for the Risorgimento and the Resistance and is sustained by a volunteer association in collaboration with the city administration. Its remit deliberately stretches past 1861: prints, photographs, posters, weapons and uniforms follow Faenza's story through the colonial campaigns, the Great War and the twenty months in which the Gothic Line turned the region into a front, up to the liberation of 1945.