Museo del Novecento

From the Arengario palace on Piazza del Duomo, the Museo del Novecento sets more than three hundred works of Italian modern art against the cathedral's gothic facade. The collection includes Futurist works and Lucio Fontana's neon installation, while the Arengario's spiral ramp frames views of the piazza.

Why it matters

Milan's civic modern-art collection had long lacked a home proportionate to its holdings of over four thousand works. The museum, inaugurated on 6 December 2010 inside the Palazzo dell'Arengario, finally put the city's twentieth century on permanent display in a building that is itself a monument of the era, facing the Duomo and the royal palace. Its Italian narrative is strong where it matters most: Futurism, metaphysical and abstract art, and the postwar experimentation that made Milan the capital of Italian modernity. The museum extends Milan's public art collections into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

What to notice

The collection opens with Futurist works, including art associated with Umberto Boccioni, and includes Lucio Fontana's neon installation. The thematic sections Segno e Materia and Gesti e Processi trace developments in postwar and later Italian art. The Arengario's spiral ramp and window over Piazza del Duomo form part of the museum's architectural setting.

Context and history

The Palazzo dell'Arengario, built in the 1930s and 1940s as the municipal seat facing the cathedral, was converted into the museum in a project that opened in December 2010, joining the Arengario to the adjacent palace and threading the ramp through its volume. The collection draws on the Civiche Raccolte d'Arte, Milan's civic art holdings, selecting more than three hundred works from the over four thousand Italian twentieth- and twenty-first- century pieces the city owns. The museum describes its mission as conservation, study and promotion of that heritage for a broad public, and it operates as a civic museum of the City of Milan alongside Palazzo Reale, whose exhibition programme it complements.