Museo Aligi Sassu

In Thiesi, the village where the painter Aligi Sassu spent part of his boyhood, a small museum holds 120 graphic works spanning his career from 1929 to 1995: lithographs, etchings, aquatints and drypoints in which galloping horses, myths and literary heroes keep company with an affectionate portrait of Sardinia itself.

Why it matters

Aligi Sassu, born in Milan in 1912 and died at Pollença in 2000, numbers among the major Italian artists of the twentieth century, and his father came from Thiesi. The museum was set up by the town council together with the Sassu Foundation and inaugurated in 2010, after the artist's widow Helenita Olivares Sassu and his son Vicente Sassu Urbina donated the body of prints that forms the permanent collection. Four rooms gather cycles that trace his whole graphic career: thirty-five sheets from the 1963 portfolio presented with an introduction by the poet Salvatore Quasimodo, fifteen colour engravings from the 1974 "Fantasie d'amore e di guerra dell'Orlando Furioso", twenty prints of the 1973 "I cavalli innamorati" and ten lithographs of "I cavalli dell'imperatore" from 1989, where his signature horses surge across the paper.

What to notice

Sassu’s imagery often brings together the sacred against the profane, myth against reality. Works drawn from literature — Alessandro Manzoni's "I Promessi Sposi" alongside Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" — hang near sheets paired with poetry, including five large lithographs of the "Omaggio alla Sardegna" series set to verses by the Sardinian poet Sebastiano Satta. Nine colour engravings of the 1989-90 "Il Mito del Mediterraneo" and seventeen large-format sheets of the 1980s complete the holding. The walls themselves belong to the story: Sassu painted murals in Thiesi during the 1960s, and among them a large fresco recalls the anti-feudal uprisings of the late eighteenth century, in which Thiesi led alongside Cheremule and Bessude; beneath it a figure in pink trachyte rises in relief from a wall of volcanic stone, an image of Sardinia standing up.

Context and history

The museum belongs to Thiesi, a town of the Logudoro in north-western Sardinia, and its creation followed a logic of return: the graphic collection was donated by the artist's family so that the village of his childhood would keep a nucleus of his work. The collection was curated by Alfredo Paglione and Silvia Pegoraro with the collaboration of Elsa Betti; Sassu’s 1960s murals in Thiesi were also intended to form a central part of the museum project. The prints alone make an unusually complete survey of a long career, moving from early 1929 sheets to the late mythological cycles of the 1990s.