Galleria d'Arte Moderna Paolo e Adele Giannoni

Inside Novara's medieval Broletto complex, the Galleria Giannoni holds a substantial civic collection of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Italian painting, assembled by a local collector and given to the city in the 1930s. Fattori, Casorati, Morbelli and Nomellini hang in a thematic circuit reopened to the public in 2021.

Why it matters

For a mid-sized city, Novara holds an unusually deep holding of Italian painting between the Risorgimento and the Second World War. The gallery's core came from Alfredo Giannoni, a Novarese collector who bought on the Milan market from the early 1900s and left the city 872 works through gifts made in 1930, 1935 and 1938 — a gift usually described as roughly 900 pieces. His taste ran to naturalism and Symbolism, with a selective eye for Divisionism, and the result is a coherent survey rather than an accidental accumulation. The 2021 reinstallation replaced the earlier chronological hang with an arrangement organised by iconographic themes. The setting adds its own weight: the museum occupies the upper floors of the Broletto, the medieval civic palace group at the heart of the old city.

What to notice

Four thematic sections organise the collection: the Risorgimento between reality and myth; the passage from historical narrative to the recording of modern life; nature posed and the landscape painted outdoors; and figures, portraits and self-portraits. Representative works include Giovanni Fattori's "Cavalcata di soldati nel bosco" of around 1898–1900, Plinio Nomellini's "Baci di sole" (1908) and his "L'imbarco dei Mille a Quarto" (around 1911), Felice Casorati's "Ragazza alla finestra" (1938), "Dalie" (around 1953) and "Donne sulla spiaggia" (around 1930), Federico Faruffini's "Autoritratto" (1867–1869), Domenico Induno's "La madre al campo", and Giovanni Sottocornola's "La lettura" (1910) and "La rosa bianca" (1907). Divisionist and Lombard naturalist painters — Angelo Morbelli among them — give the collection its regional backbone, and Piedmontese artists of the Ossola and Verbano schools appear alongside the national names.

Context and history

Giannoni collected quietly and deliberately: small-to-medium paintings and sculpture, mostly from Milanese dealers, favouring naturalist and Symbolist painting and generally avoiding the avant-gardes, with some exceptions among the Divisionists. The painter Giovanni Battista Ciolina portrayed Giannoni's parents in 1904 and later other family members, reflecting the collector's personal ties to artists he acquired. The gifts of the 1930s fixed the collection's character permanently. Public access, however, was long interrupted: the gallery closed in 1986 and reopened in March 2011, in time for the 150th anniversary of Italian unification, after a long reinstallation in the Broletto. A revision of the display, taken ten years after that reopening, produced the completely thematic layout inaugurated in 2021, which abandoned the original chronological hang for an iconographic arrangement spanning 1860-1940.