Palazzo Citterio

Fifty years after the state bought an eighteenth-century palace on Via Brera to enlarge its picture gallery, Palazzo Citterio opened in December 2024 as the modern and contemporary wing of the Grande Brera. Its rooms gather the Jucker, Vitali, Mattioli and Jesi collections, steps from the Pinacoteca's old masters.

Why it matters

The palace completes a project conceived in the 1970s by two Brera superintendents, Gian Alberto Dell'Acqua and Franco Russoli, who wanted the state collection to span from the Renaissance to the present on a single Brera campus. The state purchased the building in 1972 for exactly this purpose, but the plan waited decades for funding and restoration. Its opening on 8 December 2024 joined the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Braidense National Library and the Accademia di Belle Arti into one cultural quarter, giving Milan's twentieth-century art a permanent state home at last.

What to notice

The building itself is an argument between centuries. The piano nobile preserves the proportions and stucco of an aristocratic townhouse, while below it lies a Brutalist hypogeum level designed in the 1960s–70s by James Stirling, the British architect whose unpublished Brera scheme became legend — the underground galleries that were actually built now serve as exhibition space. The collections include works associated with Umberto Boccioni, Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio Morandi and Pablo Picasso, alongside works assembled by Milanese collecting families. The palace stands beside the Orto Botanico, a garden dating to 1774.

Context and history

Palazzo Citterio stands on Via Brera, within the same block as the Pinacoteca. It takes its name from the Citterio family of the nineteenth century; before the state purchase it passed through aristocratic and institutional hands like its neighbours. Russoli, the superintendent who championed the 1972 acquisition, argued that a national gallery could not stop at the Risorgimento; the delay that followed — half a century of partial uses and stalled restorations — became a standing complaint of Milanese cultural debate. The completed project brought the Pinacoteca, the Braidense National Library and the Accademia di Belle Arti into the cultural quarter envisioned by its founders.