Galleria d'Arte Moderna Pino Casarini

Palazzo Carli on Piazza Duomo guards the donation of Pino Casarini, the Verona painter who created scenery for the Arena di Verona: 68 paintings, 150 scenic sketches and 800 drawings spanning 1926 to 1970, with the same hand visible on the town's bronze portal and in its parish collections.

Why it matters

This is the museum of Sacile, and it preserves an unusually coherent body of work by one painter rather than a mixed collection. Pino Casarini, born in Verona in 1897 and died in 1972, was a fresco painter, illustrator, stained-glass artist and sculptor whom the official portal ranks among the great fresco painters of the Italian twentieth century. After his death, his widow donated the contents of the studio to the parish of Sacile, giving a river town of the province of Pordenone a compact museum of twentieth-century sacred and scenic art. The gallery's broader context includes the bronze portal of the Duomo di San Nicolò, also created by Casarini.

What to notice

The 68 paintings cover five decades. The 150 sketches for stage sets at the Arena di Verona include studies for open-air opera productions. Around them sit some 800 drawings and preparatory studies, dated between 1926 and 1970, tracing the working method of a fresco painter who thought in full-scale cartoons. Letters and writings kept in the parish archive document the professional network behind the canvases. Casarini's fresco cycles elsewhere, from the Palazzo del Bo in Padua to the Castelvecchio museum in Verona, and his exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadriennale, give the local collection a national frame.

Context and history

The gallery occupies the main floor of Palazzo Carli, a sixteenth-century Venetian palace on Piazza Duomo. The donation by the artist's widow turned the palace into the permanent home of the collection, with the parish of Sacile as its custodian; correspondence and writings joined the paintings in the parish archive. As a single-painter museum rooted in one town's parish, the gallery preserves a distinctive collection of twentieth-century scenographic drawings in Friuli Venezia Giulia.