Florence, Civic Museums' visitable storerooms inaugurated. They will house 4,500 works

Florence’s civic museums are inaugurating their visitable repositories: several works of art that have hitherto remained hidden from the public due to lack of adequate space for their display will thus be able to be seen by all. The repositories have found a home in the Santa Maria Novella Complex and were inaugurated today in the presence of Mayor Dario Nardella, Regional President Eugenio Giani, Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Culture Alessia Bettini and Councillor for Public Works Elisabetta Meucci. The municipal artistic heritage includes thousands of movable property divided into collections, some of which are on display in the city’s various civic museums or stored in adjoining warehouses, and some of which have been dismembered and sheltered in temporary locations, waiting for a place where they could be reunited and reorganized. Thus, the City Council decided to allocate part of the large rooms of the Santa Maria Novella complex to an original project that would allow not only to collect large quantities of artworks in optimal conditions of preservation, but also to make them usable for citizens. Among the artists on display are Fontana, Guttuso, Carrà, De Pisis, Mafai, Cagli, and Morandi.

The new storerooms were built on a project by the Technical Services Directorate in collaboration with the Culture and Sports Directorate, as part of the campaign to upgrade the rooms in the Santa Maria Novella complex vacated in 2016 by the Carabinieri School of Marshals and Brigadiers. The work cost about two million euros for the part of the renovation of the rooms as part of the transformation of the entire complex and almost 40 thousand euros for the part of transportation and staging, with plans to spend an additional 200 thousand euros for the next stages of increasing the works on display.

In this first phase, in fact, about 300 works belonging to the Alberto Della Ragione collection and other nuclei of the Collections of the Twentieth Century have already been arranged. To these will gradually be added the remaining part of the twentieth-century collections, functional to the exhibition rotations of the nearby Museo Novecento, the sinopites from the fresco cycle of the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella, some nineteenth-century collections including that of the former Museum of the Risorgimento and the legacy of Icilio Cappellini including paintings by the Macchiaioli, the unexhibited works of the former Museo storico-topografico Firenze com’era, and a large collection of marbles, plaster casts and stone artifacts of various origins, for an estimated total of about 4. 500 goods.

The deposits of

The deposits of the Florentine Civic

The deposits of the Florentine Civic

The new repositories are housed in a part of the building bordering the western arm of the Chiostro Grande. Multiple functions have followed one another in these ancient rooms over the centuries: Papal Apartments, a construction site for the cartoon of Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, dormitories of the New Monastery, the Santissima Annunziata Female Boarding School, and finally barracks for the Carabinieri Petty Officers’ School. Long inaccessible because they were included in the barracks, thanks to the redevelopment implemented by the Municipal Administration, they now come back to life as a place for the preservation and display of artistic heritage. The storage rooms occupy an area of 1,100 square meters, arranged on three floors: on the ground floor, the rooms consist of a large vaulted room of 290 square meters that houses the “Sculpture Gallery” set up with platforms, plinths, shelves and shelving for statues, busts, and various stone materials; the storage rooms on the second floor have an area of about 650 square meters distributed in nine rooms. In the two largest rooms, massive self-supporting metal structures have been built, some of which are already equipped with large, double-sided, sliding grating panels that guarantee the hanging of paintings on both sides; in the other rooms, additional display and conservation equipment has been provided, not only grating, but also drawers and shelving to place heterogeneous artifacts. Completing the storage rooms are additional spaces for office and laboratory functions for maintenance work.

The spaces, in addition to ensuring that the new repositories properly carry out their ordinary function as repositories of works, instrumental to study, conservation and enhancement projects, make it possible to make them accessible to the public through guided tours by reservation. The tours, curated by MUS.E, will give the opportunity to discover not only the works stored there, but also the ’behind-the-scenes’ operation of a modern museum repository. The first guided tours will be held on Friday, Jan. 26 at 2, 3 and 4 p.m. and Saturday, Jan. 27 at 10, 11 and 12 a.m. and will be free to the public; starting in February, they will continue for a fee every Saturday. Reservations are always required at 055-2768224 or e-mail info@musefirenze.it.

“There is nothing more unpleasant in Italy, a country with such a high concentration of works of art, than to have so many works of art locked in storage without citizens being able to admire them,” said Mayor Dario Nardella. “Instead, today in Florence we have achieved an ambitious goal: in these spaces we will come to contain as many as 4,500 works from our repositories that will be enjoyed by citizens, scholars and tourists, a great achievement of culture and civilization. This project is part of a new part of the transformation of the Santa Maria Novella complex: we are working on the opening of the Italian Mundi museum, the cafeteria, the redevelopment of the inner courtyard, social housing apartments and the new library, in a mix of cultural, social and civic functions that is truly unique in the city.”

Florence, Civic Museums' visitable storerooms inaugurated. They will house 4,500 works

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