Rome is preparing to welcome back the Museum of the Roman School, which from September 17, 2025 will reopen its doors in the spaces of the Casino Nobile of Villa Torlonia with a renovated layout. In fact, the inauguration marks the conclusion of an articulated rearrangement project promoted and curated by the Capitoline Superintendency and carried out in collaboration with Zètema Progetto Cultura. BNL BNP Paribas, which has granted on loan sixty works from its collection, including the famous “Collezione Roma,” a precious nucleus of views of the capital made between 1946 and 1948, contributes to make the exhibition even richer.
The museographic intervention comes nearly two decades after the museum’s first opening, dated 2006, and responds to new needs for visit accessibility. The itinerary has been reorganized into thematic sections that guide the visitor through the different languages and movements that animated Roman artistic life between the two wars. The scientific project bears the signatures of Federica Pirani, Claudio Crescentini, Antonia Rita Arconti, Annapaola Agati and Elena Scarfò, while the layout was curated by Stefano Busoni and Andrea Pesce Delfino.
The new itinerary is organized around central nuclei such as “The School of Via Cavour” and “The Artists of Villa Strohl Fern,” which restore the creative climate of the capital in the early decades of the 20th century. Other insights are devoted to “Faces and Bodies” and “Artistic Languages between the Two Wars,” with a look that links individual experiences to a broader view of the cultural landscape of the time. Special attention is given to Rome, with sections entitled “Roman Landscapes,” “Construction Sites,” “Cities without Myth” and, indeed, “The Rome Collection,” designed to document the profound urban and social changes that marked the city in the period between the two world wars.
There are more than 150 works on display, including paintings, sculptures, drawings and engravings, from both the permanent collection and loans from private individuals and institutions, as well as masterpieces that are rarely accessible because they are kept in the repositories of the Sovrintendenza or housed in private collections. The itinerary offers the public prominent names and currents: from the “Return to Order” and the revival of the Italian tradition with Carlo Socrates and Quirino Ruggeri to the “Magic Realism” of Antonio Donghi, Francesco Alessandro Di Cocco, Francesco Trombadori and Riccardo Francalancia. There is no shortage of the visionary expressionism of Ferruccio Ferrazzi and the anti-academic research of the School of Via Cavour with Mario Mafai, Antonietta Raphaël and Scipione.
Ample space is also reserved for the tonal experiments of Corrado Cagli, Emanuele Cavalli, Roberto Melli and Guglielmo Janni, the documentary realism of Eva Quajotto, Antonio Barrera, Domenico Quattrociocchi and Odoardo Ferretti, and the realistic language matured on the eve of World War II with artists such as Alberto Ziveri, Fausto Pirandello, Renato Guttuso and the young Renzo Vespignani. Completing the picture are the works of sculptural masters such as Pericle Fazzini, Mirko Basaldella and Leoncillo Leonardi, as well as the great engraver Luigi Bartolini.
The rearrangement also marks an important step toward recognizing the presence of women in the history of twentieth-century Roman art. In fact, in addition to Raphaël and Quajotto, artists such as Edita Broglio, Leonetta Cecchi Pieraccini, Adriana Pincherle, Katy Castellucci, Pasquarosa, Maria Immacolata Zaffuto and Maria Letizia Giuliani Melis appear. Their participation confirms the line of the Capitoline Superintendency, which in recent years has devoted increasing attention to the rediscovery of female figures who have often remained on the margins of official historiography.
BNL BNP Paribas’ contribution takes the form of the granting of valuable works, including the “Roma Collection,” a corpus of 54 small-format paintings (20x26 cm) made between 1946 and 1948 by some of the leading artists of the period. The idea came from journalist and writer Cesare Zavattini, who commissioned it for film producer Ferruccio Caramelli. It featured masters such as Mario Mafai, Filippo de Pisis, Renato Guttuso, Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio, joined by up-and-coming young artists such as Afro, Fausto Pirandello and Renzo Vespignani, all of whom were called upon to confront the theme “Aspects of the City of Rome.” Having become part of the bank’s collection in 1983, the series is now one of the most valuable nuclei of BNL BNP Paribas’ artistic heritage, which counts more than six thousand works and is regularly made available to exhibitions and institutions.
Alongside the “Rome Collection,” the exhibition features paintings that tell the story of the capital’s urban transformations in the 1930s, when major gutting radically altered the face of the city. These include Demolitions in Piazza Navona by Eva Quajotto, Temple of Venus and Rome during the demolitions for the construction of Via dell’Impero by Domenico Quattrociocchi, and Demolitions in Via Montanara by Odoardo Ferretti. Works that are flanked by dreamy visions such as Francesco Alessandro Di Cocco’s 1930 Composizione, social testimonies such as Maria Immacolata Zaffuto’s Operai series, created by recovering the ancient encaustic technique, and iconic portraits such as that of critic Roberto Longhi painted by Amerigo Bartoli Natinguerra in 1924.
The new exhibit not only displays works, but is enriched with educational and multimedia apparatus. Thanks to a collaboration with the Istituto Luce Archives, visitors will be able to access video and audio content via QR codes, which enriches the visitor experience and meets the needs of a public increasingly attentive to interactivity and accessibility.
“The Villa Torlonia Museum of the Roman School,” says Mayor Roberto Gualtieri, “is being returned to our City in a renewed guise. The new layout enhances Rome’s significant role as a place for artists of diverse backgrounds and training to meet and share ideas - then as now. Despite the complex and at times dramatic historical context, this generation of artists active between the wars demonstrated how art and culture are always able to flourish and generate new energies.”
The Museum of the Roman School, established in 2006, grew out of a collaboration between Roma Capitale and scholars, collectors and heirs of artists linked to the movement, many of whom were already active in the Archivio della Scuola Romana Association founded in 1983 by Netta Vespignani. Thanks to a public-private partnership, with donated and loaned acquisitions, it was possible to open to the public a heritage that would otherwise have remained confined to private collections. The 2025 reopening renews that vocation, with an updated and inclusive look that aims to restore a broader narrative of one of the most vital and complex moments in the history of 20th-century Italian art.
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| Roman School Museum reopens: new layout and focus on the city |
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