Museo Sandro Pertini e Renata Cuneo

Two Savonese lives meet inside one vaulted hall on the Priamar: Sandro Pertini, the Republic's president, and Renata Cuneo, the sculptor who gave her city her life's work. Their donations face each other across a fortress room in a museum that reads as a double biography.

Why it matters

Italy has many museums of modern art, but few tell a story like this one. The core is the private collection of Alessandro "Sandro" Pertini, the socialist and anti-fascist from the Savona hinterland who became the seventh President of the Republic, assembled over a lifetime through purchases, gifts from artist friends and official presents, and bequeathed to his home city at his wife Carla Voltolina's witness. Facing it hangs the sculpture collection that Renata Cuneo, one of the most representative Italian sculptors of the twentieth century, donated to Savona in 1986. The museum is also the document centre for the city's civic history, and its setting — the Palazzo della Loggia inside the sixteenth-century fortress — means art, memory and military architecture share the same visit.

What to notice

The layout is unusual and deliberate: both collections stand on the second floor of the Palazzo della Loggia, in contiguous but clearly distinct sections that keep the donors' personalities separate. In the great hall with its cross vaults, the Pertini collection runs along the nave facing the city while the Cuneo sculptures line the nave looking onto the fortress's Piazza d'Armi, so the two gifts confront each other for the length of the room. Pertini's hundred-odd paintings and sculptures include works by Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, Joan Miró, Giorgio Morandi, Renato Guttuso, Giacomo Manzù, Francesco Messina, Giò Pomodoro, Mario Sironi, Emilio Vedova, Aligi Sassu, Antonio Corpora, Agenore Fabbri and Remo Brindisi — a snapshot of what artists gave one head of state out of affection. Cuneo's bronzes, ceramics and terracottas, mostly figures of religious and profane subjects, include "L'uomo che dorme", "Giovanna d'Arco", "Il Muratorino", the "Ecce Homo" and her 1928 self-portrait. Works not on display are preserved in a storage space near the entrance.

Context and history

Pertini was born at Stella, in the Savona hinterland, on 25 September 1896, trained in law and social sciences, and fought a lifetime of anti-fascist militancy before being elected President of the Republic in 1978; the museum grew from his wish, expressed to Carla Voltolina, to leave his collection to Savona. The Museo d'Arte Sandro Pertini opened in 1991 on the first floor of the Palazzo della Loggia. Cuneo, born in Savona in 1903 and died there in 1995, gave the city fifty sculptures in bronze, terracotta, ceramic and wax, twenty-eight plaster models and a hundred and fifty drawings; her museum first opened in 1990 in the fortress's San Bernardo bastion, and since 2013 the two bequests have been shown together on the Palazzo della Loggia's second floor under their joint name. The pairing reads as a civic portrait of twentieth-century Savona: the president's network of artists on one side, the city's own sculptor on the other.