Museo del Paesaggio

Verbania's civic museum takes its name from a broad idea: not postcard views, but the lived, changing visible world of the lake country. Founded in 1909, it gathers Lombard and Piedmontese painting, sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy's great plaster-cast bequest, sculpture, photography and graphics in a baroque palazzo above the Pallanza lakefront, and its collections reflect the cultural history of the lake region.

Why it matters

The Museo del Paesaggio is the artistic memory institution of the Verbano. Its pinacoteca traces regional painting from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, with core figures such as Daniele Ranzoni, Carlo Fornara and Mario Tozzi who worked in or around these shores. Its gipsoteca preserves the studio material of Troubetzkoy, the celebrated portrait sculptor of the Belle Epoque who retired to the lake, and its photographic archive documents a century and a half of the territory. Its collections connect the region's landscapes with the people and artistic traditions that shaped them.

What to notice

The Troubetzkoy collection includes some 340 works, comprising plaster studies alongside marble, bronze, wax and terracotta pieces donated by the sculptor’s heirs after his death in 1938. These works show the working method behind portraits that made him famous across Europe and America. The painting collection includes works by Daniele Ranzoni, the Divisionist Carlo Fornara and Mario Tozzi, whose roundels also survive in the church of Santa Lucia in Suna, as well as sculpture by Arturo Martini. Founder Antonio Massara treated "paesaggio" as the human scene as well as the panorama, an idea reflected in the museum's painting, photography and documentary collections. Photography and graphics collections run to some fifteen thousand images of the territory. The museum also runs Casa Elide Ceretti in Verbania Intra, left to the institution by the painter Elide Ceretti, as its venue for contemporary exhibitions and workshops. Its activities are distributed across several sites.

Context and history

Antonio Massara and the Pro Verbano association founded the museum in Pallanza in 1909 to collect the history and art of the Verbano and neighbouring valleys. It took the name Museo del Paesaggio in 1914 and moved to the seventeenth-century Palazzo Viani Dugnani. Massara's founding idea — collecting the visible culture of the territory rather than trophies — guided acquisitions across painting, sculpture and the new medium of photography. Troubetzkoy's gipsoteca arrived in 1938–39 as a bequest from the sculptor's heirs after his death. Over the following century the institution expanded to multiple sites — the palazzo, Casa Ceretti and Palazzo Biumi Innocenti in Verbania, and an archaeology section housed in the town hall of Ornavasso, outside the city — and reorganised as an autonomous moral entity. Today it pairs the permanent collections with a rolling programme of temporary exhibitions, festivals and educational work.