From November 4, 2026, to August 22, 2027, the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia will host “TESORI: The Grand Story of Brescia’s Museums. 1826 | 2026,” a major exhibition dedicated to the history of the city’s civic collections. A journey through one hundred works not normally on display, in which heritage, memory, and personal stories intertwine. Curated by Stefano Karadjov and Roberta D’Adda, the exhibition is sponsored by the City of Brescia and the Brescia Museums Foundation and marks the culmination of the celebrations for the bicentennial of the discovery of the Winged Victory. The famous Roman sculpture, exceptional in its composition, material, and state of preservation, is in fact one of the few large Roman bronzes from an archaeological excavation to have survived to the present day. Accompanying its discovery are six heads from the Imperial period and hundreds of other bronze artifacts.
The focus of the exhibition lies not only in the works themselves but also in the stories surrounding their collection, conservation, and transmission. The exhibition draws inspiration from the principles of the Faro Convention, the 2005 Council of Europe treaty ratified by Italy in 2020, which views cultural heritage not merely as a collection of material assets, but as a shared right and responsibility. From this perspective, Brescia’s collections are presented as a constantly evolving entity, in which the objects bear witness to the people and eras they have traversed.
The exhibition thus aims to trace the origins and evolution of art collecting in Brescia, from the ideals of 19th-century encyclopedism to the Risorgimento and the cult of cultural heritage, from the Romantic taste for the exotic to works linked to the Fascist dictatorship, all the way to today’s principles of protection, conservation, and promotion.
Visitors will be guided above all by the stories of those who contributed to the formation of the civic collections: people who collected, saved, donated, or studied the objects now preserved in the Civic Museums. Alongside the best-known collectors, figures seemingly far removed from the museum world will emerge: a late-19th-century watchmaker, a Red Cross nurse, a riding instructor, a sailor, a soldier in love, a “serial hoarder,” a priest with controversial associations, a captain in the Alpine Troops, and a high school teacher. Their stories form a sort of collective saga about the birth and evolution of the very idea of a museum. Illustrator Elisa Macellari will bring these protagonists to life through a series of 20 portraits that will guide visitors along the exhibition route.
The TESORI exhibition is organized into five sections, inspired by five areas of 19th-century museology: Archaeology, Fine Arts, Science and Technology, History, and Ethnography. Each section offers a unique journey through time. The narrative begins in the present and progressively moves backward, creating a dialogue between recent works and artifacts from the historical collections. Contemporary artists featured include Mohammed Al-Hawajri, Badiucao, Giuseppe Bergomi, Bruce Gilden, Axel Hütte, David LaChapelle, Victoria Lomasko, Joel Meyerowitz, Giulio Paolini, Fabrizio Plessi, Davide Rivalta, Alfred Seiland, Massimo Sestini, and Mary Zygouri. Their works have been acquired by the Fondazione Brescia Musei over the past ten years and are part of an ongoing effort to enrich the civic collections that has continued for centuries.
The journey into the past, on the other hand, leads to works by great masters already present in the collections, including Albrecht Dürer, Lattanzio Gambara, Francesco Hayez, Angelo Inganni, Giovan Battista Moroni, Pelagio Palagi, Rembrandt, Guido Reni, Romanino, and Angelo Zanelli.
One of the most original aspects of the exhibition is the juxtaposition of famous works with seemingly ordinary objects, in a display inspired by the Chamber of Wonders. Particularly precious pieces will emerge from the museum’s storage, such as the Byzantine astrolabe from 1062 that belonged to Cardinal Bessarion, alongside refined Oriental kakemono paintings and everyday items such as herbarium sheets and historical postcards.
Visitors will encounter an extraordinary variety of artifacts: marble sculptures and frescoes, Egyptian bronzes and drawings, engravings and photographs, video art, majolica and glassware, musical instruments, memorabilia and posters, ceremonial masks, and paintings dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Thanks to a collaboration with the Museum of Natural Sciences, the exhibition will also feature animal mummies, dinosaur fossil footprints, and rare fragments of meteorites that fell in the Brescia area during the 19th century.
Part of the project also explores how non-Western cultures have been represented through objects collected during the colonial era and the years of the Fascist dictatorship. In this context, objects that belonged to Benito Mussolini—seized after the fall of the Republic of Salò—will also be on display. African weapons that arrived in Brescia via merchants and military personnel drawn to their exotic nature will be juxtaposed with African ritual masks and sculptures purchased in Paris by the artist Bruno Romeda, which were later donated to the Fondazione Brescia Musei. This comparison invites reflection on the provenance of the objects, the reasons behind their collection, and the different meanings they may take on when transferred from one cultural context to another.
The exhibition will also be accompanied by a series of urban itineraries designed to link the exhibition to the works housed in the permanent collections of the Civic Museums and to some of the city’s most significant sites. In this way, Brescia’s cultural heritage can be viewed as a widespread network of works, buildings, collections, and memories, extending beyond the boundaries of any single exhibition venue. With its one hundred works, *TESORI. The Great Novel of Brescia’s Museums. 1826 | 2026* transforms two centuries of museum history into a collective narrative, in which each object becomes the starting point for reconstructing a human, cultural, or historical story.
The catalog is published by Skira.
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| Brescia: At the Santa Giulia Museum, 100 works tell the story of the city’s public collections |
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