Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci

Prato, a city built on wool, decided in the 1980s to collect the art of the present. The result, opened in 1988 as the first museum in Italy purpose-built for contemporary creation, pairs a Rationalist building by Italo Gamberini with a striking extension by Maurice Nio and a collection of more than a thousand works.

Why it matters

The Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci was founded by the industrialist Enrico Pecci in memory of his son Luigi, and it changed the geography of Italian art: until 1988, no museum in the country had been purpose-built for exhibiting and promoting international avant-garde work. Its permanent collection, over a thousand artworks by more than three hundred artists, tracks the last half-century through Arte Povera and Transavantgarde, photography and works from the former Soviet Union, with names from Lucio Fontana and Michelangelo Pistoletto to Barbara Kruger and Nobuyoshi Araki. The centre brought international contemporary art to Prato.

What to notice

• The architecture combines the original Rationalist volume designed by Italo Gamberini with the 2000s restructuring and expansion by Maurice Nio, which gave the complex its profile and more than four thousand square metres of exhibition space.
• The centre's Eccentrica selection presents works from its collection.
• The archive and specialised library hold some sixty thousand volumes.
• The complex includes an auditorium, an open-air theatre and a cinema.
• Henry Moore's Square Form with Cut is part of Prato's civic collection of contemporary public art.

Context and history

The centre opened in 1988 on Viale della Repubblica, a boulevard threaded through Prato's eastern expansion, on an endowment of industrial wealth typical of the city's self-made patronage. Its exhibition history brought international currents to Tuscany while the collection grew through acquisitions and donations, including a major gift from Carlo Palli. The Nio expansion added an archive, library, auditorium and restaurant to the complex.