Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco — Collezione Burri

A postwar industrial plant built to dry tobacco became Alberto Burri's last great canvas: eleven sheds, one chosen by the artist himself, now holding the monumental Cycles whose scale conventional galleries could not accommodate.

Why it matters

When Burri's works outgrew easel size in the late 1970s, they needed a building of industrial scale. On the edge of Città di Castello stood eleven sheds erected just after the Second World War for drying tropical tobacco. Burri first obtained one shed as a studio, then bought the entire complex as the permanent home for his final creations. In the summer of 1990 he inaugurated it as the second seat of the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri. The collection includes 128 works, dominated by the Cellotex series that occupied much of his final two decades: vast, incised surfaces whose full effect emerges when the Cycles are seen together.

What to notice

The long bays give the large reliefs room to unfold. Cellotex, a wood-based compound, is the principal material: from the 1970s Burri worked its surface with a burin, scoring, scraping, lifting or painting it, so that at a distance it reads as a monolith and close up as a landscape. Four large sculptures belong to the installation, one indoors and three facing the building in the garden. The semibasement holds Burri's graphic work and a documentary section.

Context and history

In 1966, after the Arno flood, the sheds sheltered flood-damaged volumes from Florence's National Library and court archives pending restoration. Burri's arrival transformed them a decade later: architect Tiziano Sarteanesi designed and executed the conversion for museum use, including the semibasement extension. From 2015 a broad programme of remediation and upgrading modernized the complex in stages, with the exhibition halls completed in 2022.