Casa Cavazzini - Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea

Udine keeps its museum of modern and contemporary art inside a Renaissance townhouse transformed by architect Gae Aulenti. Basaldella canvases, early twentieth-century Friulian collections and an American post-war gift hang where a fabric merchant once lived and traded.

Why it matters

Casa Cavazzini is where the art story of Udine reaches the twentieth century. The city's older collections live on the castle hill, but the modern museum sits in the shopping streets, inside a building that the collector Dante Cavazzini left to the comune by testamentary will. Opened to the public in 2012 after a long restoration designed by Gae Aulenti — the architect of the Musée d'Orsay's interior — the museum gathers Friulian painting, Italian modernism and international post-war art under one roof. It also preserves the apartment the Cavazzini family furnished, with mural temperas painted by Afro Basaldella in 1938 still on its walls and ceilings.

What to notice

Restoration revealed late-fourteenth-century profane frescoes, a sixteenth-century Venetian-style cistern and a deposit of protohistoric pottery from the early Iron Age, in the second half of the eighth century BC — the oldest trace on the site. The collection includes Mirko Basaldella's "Chimera urlante" (1956) and "Il rostro" (1964), his brother Afro's "Si fondano le città" (1939) through "Angelica" (1964), and Dino Basaldella's iron sculptures of the 1960s. The Astaldi collection brings Giorgio De Chirico, Mario Sironi, Giorgio Morandi, Renato Guttuso, Gino Severini and works linked to Picasso, Braque and Chagall; the FRIAM collection, formed in 1976 by the Italo-American committee Friul Arts and Monuments as a gesture of solidarity after the Friuli earthquake, adds Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd and Frank Stella. Since May 2024 a permanent Sala Zigaina honours Giuseppe Zigaina (1924–2015), including the large "Assemblea dei braccianti sul Cormor" shown at the 1952 Venice Biennale.

Context and history

The house entered local history around 1540, when the Colombatti family, originally from Faedis, acquired the property. In the early 1900s Count Gustavo Colombatti rented the ground floor to Dante Cavazzini (1890–1987), who ran his furnishing-fabrics shop "Al Ribasso" there; after Colombatti's death in 1937 Cavazzini bought the whole building and moved in, commissioning architect Ermes Midena (1895–1972) to remake the first floor as a modern apartment. Afro Basaldella frescoed its walls in 1938. Antonio Marangoni (1806–1885) had earlier left his estate to the city with an obligation to buy art each year, a bequest that built the nucleus of the civic collections; the Astaldi donation and the FRIAM gift of 1976 completed the museum's range. The Aulenti project joined these layers — medieval, Renaissance, bourgeois, modern — into a single itinerary.