MAN - Museo d'Arte

In a 1920s building in Nuoro's historic quarter, the MAN brings Sardinian art from the twentieth century onward together with temporary exhibitions.

Why it matters

Nuoro's MAN is a permanent public institution devoted to modern and contemporary art, and belongs to AMACI, the national association of contemporary art museums. Opened to the public in 1999, it was assembled around merged public collections from the province, the municipality, the provincial tourism board and the Chamber of Commerce, and its permanent collection brings together Sardinian artists of different generations. It is an open institution for artistic research and experimentation. For central Sardinia it is the reference point for seeing how the island's own artists converse with broader developments in Italian art.

What to notice

The collection's core is Sardinian art from the twentieth century to today, which makes the visit a compact survey of the island's modern chapter. Its collection includes works by Antonio Ballero and Francesco Ciusa, two figures of Nuoro's early twentieth-century cultural season, alongside Mario Delitala, Maria Lai and Costantino Nivola. The building itself deserves attention: a 1920s structure in the historic centre, close to the Piazza Satta that Nivola designed, whose rooms now hold painting, graphics and experimental work. Temporary exhibitions span art from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Context and history

The museum opened in 1999 inside a building dating to the 1920s that had previously housed a provincial institution, and in its first years it functioned as an office within the province's culture department. In 2004 it gained managerial autonomy as a public institution and joined AMACI; in 2013 the region recognised it as a museum of excellence. The founding idea was administrative as much as curatorial: the first collection nucleus came from merging public holdings of the Provincia, the Comune, the provincial tourism board and the Chamber of Commerce. Exhibitions remain the museum's primary activity, and the institution also takes work beyond its walls with extramuros projects engaging communities across the territory.