Pinacoteca Carlo Levi

Inside a seventeenth-century palace on the Budello, Alassio's Carlo Levi Art Gallery presents the work of Carlo Levi, the writer and painter of Christ Stopped at Eboli, who painted the Ligurian coast over many summers. The collection includes twenty-two canvases, a portrait of Italo Calvino and the manuscript of Levi's final book.

Why it matters

Carlo Levi chose Alassio as his summer refuge from 1929 until his death in 1975, painting local landscapes of olive groves, rocks and carob trees, sometimes arranged across several stacked canvases to build large compositions he titled after myths, books and animals. The municipal gallery in Palazzo Morteo holds twenty-two of his canvases together with display cases of letters, notes and sketches. Among them hangs the celebrated portrait of his young friend Italo Calvino, the writer from Sanremo who visited Levi's hillside house each year. The gallery is also listed by Italy's Ministry of Culture.

What to notice

The gallery occupies Palazzo Morteo, a seventeenth-century building. Its marble portal and staircase are features of the building; a plaque of local history recalls that in 1887 Count Luigi Morteo left the building to the town's agricultural mutual-aid society on condition of cultural use. The Self-portrait with pipe, the only canvas in the room painted away from Alassio, is on loan from the Fondazione Carlo Levi in Rome. Several carob-tree paintings join canvases edge to edge, a recurring feature of Levi's work. The archive cases carry the manuscript of the Quaderno a cancelli, the book he was writing when he died, donated to the city by Antonio and Silvia Ricci.

Context and history

The gallery's collections came through civic gifts and loans. Count Luigi Morteo bequeathed the palazzo for cultural use in 1887; the paintings entered through loans from the Fondazione Carlo Levi; the paper archive arrived after 2004, when the publisher Antonio Ricci bought part of Levi's historical archive at auction and gave it to Alassio, where it was catalogued with the University of Genoa. Part of that documentary collection is consultable at the civic library, and the Ministry of Culture's museum sheet records the gallery's educational services and its tie to the library's management. Together, the canvases and papers document Levi's art and his circle of writers, painters and friends in Alassio.