Palazzo de Nordis - Collezione Famiglia De Martiis

On the square beside Cividale's cathedral, Palazzo de Nordis has been a noble residence, the cradle of the city's archaeological museum, and now a gallery of modern art. Its upper floors hold the De Martiis collection, donated to the town and shown permanently since September 2020, with the visitor centre below.

Why it matters

Cividale's museum story is strongest on the early Middle Ages, so a serious collection of twentieth-century painting is a genuine broadening of what the town offers. The gallery occupies a late-Quattrocento palace on Piazza Duomo that had already served culture for two centuries: in the 1800s its rooms held the collections of the Regio Moderno Museo, the nucleus from which the National Archaeological Museum grew, and the museum stayed here until 1990. In 2020, after a municipal and state valorisation agreement, the palace returned to public life with the donated collection of the Friulian entrepreneur Giancarlo De Martiis and the city's Visitor Centre on the ground floor. Temporary exhibitions, including a Titian in 2023 and a programme of contemporary shows, run alongside the permanent display.

What to notice

The display route occupies the first and second floors and doubles as a portrait of its maker: De Martiis bought by emotion rather than by artist name or market value, and described the collection as a passion cultivated over the years, autonomously and alone — built in parallel with forty years of work in Cividale. Around that core, the hang moves through abstract and figurative Novecento: pastels by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; Informale works by Karel Appel, Victor Vasarely, Sebastian Matta and Graham Sutherland; and a strong Italian contingent with Afro Basaldella, Virgilio Guidi, Mario Sironi, Emilio Vedova, Tancredi Parmeggiani, Giuseppe Santomaso and Zoran Mušič. A later focus brought in the Czech Pravoslav Kotík and works tied to the early twentieth-century Eastern European avant-gardes, with Vasili Ermilov, Popova, Rozanova, Udalcova and Rodchenko among the names. Downstairs, the palace itself is the exhibit: the imposing main portal opens from Piazza Duomo, with a second refined entrance on Corso Mazzini.

Context and history

The palace is described by its operator as an elegant building of the second half of the fifteenth century, remodelled as early as the sixteenth. Its nineteenth-century role as seat of the Regio Moderno Museo matters beyond local pride: that collection pioneered conservation methods and evolved into today's Museo Archeologico Nazionale, which left the building in 1990 for the Palazzo dei Provveditori Veneti. From 2010 the palace hosted temporary exhibitions and national conferences. A valorisation agreement between the state and the Municipality, signed on 31 January 2014 and expanded on 7 September 2016, placed the state-owned building on loan for use to the town, clearing the way for the restoration and the 15 September 2020 opening of the permanent gallery with the collection donated to the Comune.