The construction site for the Lucca Center for the Arts, a project intended to create a new museum and exhibition center within the city’s urban walls, gets underway in Lucca. With the start of work in Piazzale Verdi, an initiative promoted by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca and the Ragghianti Foundation, created with the aim of consolidating the city’s role in national and international cultural circuits, enters its operational phase.
The new center has been conceived as a space dedicated to contemporary arts and interdisciplinary activities, with a program that will include exhibitions, events and cultural initiatives aimed at different audiences. The project involves a total investment of more than ten million euros and involves a historic building of about 2,500 square meters located in the city center, intended to be returned to the community as an open place dedicated to cultural production and enjoyment.
The opening of the construction site marks the beginning of the recovery of a space that has long remained inaccessible. In addition to structural upgrades, work is planned to enhance the building’s historic environments, including the 18th-century decorations in the entrance hall. The project also includes the creation of new flexible and fully accessible exhibition spaces. The architectural design was entrusted to Too Studio, which developed a solution geared toward combining the preservation of historical elements with the functional needs of a contemporary cultural center.
The construction site will also be accompanied by an initiative aimed at citizens. The scaffolding that will surround the building will in fact host a photographic project designed to trace the different uses that have characterized the complex over time. In fact, the building has served many functions in the city’s history: it was initially a hospital, then a kindergarten, then the headquarters of the Manifattura Tabacchi after-work club, and finally the National Cinema, an activity that ended with the final closure of the hall in 2009.
The documentation displayed during the work will be made from materials preserved in Lucca’s photographic archives and will accompany the various stages of the building’s recovery. The research was made possible by the collaboration of the Lucca Photographic Archives, the Pacini Fazzi publishing house and researcher Simonetta Simonetti. The Lucca Center for the Arts is scheduled to open by 2029. In parallel with the transformation of the spaces, the Foundation is already engaged in defining the exhibition program and cultural activities that will accompany the opening of the new center.
“A place of great significance,” says Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca President Massimo Marsili, “will be returned to the city. The nucleus of Lucca’s first hospital, a kindergarten school, the site of the Manifattura Tabacchi’s after-work activities and then a cinema, the property will become an exhibition center for the arts equipped with everything necessary to make usable the De Simone, Civitali, Paolini, Batoni and the works of Guidotti and Kauffmann, among others in the collection of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca, and to host temporary exhibitions conceived and realized independently also drawing on the immense archival, bibliographic and methodological heritage of the Ragghianti Foundation. The promotion of cultural tourist flows interested in quality artistic proposals is one of the priority objectives of the intervention. After the functional recovery of the church and convent of San Francesco, the Foundation intends to link the redevelopment of a historic building in the city to a civic and social function. I would like to thank the City of Lucca, the Superintendent’s Office and all the authorizing bodies that helped to improve the initial project and finally make it cantierabile.”
“The Center of the Arts was born from an ambitious challenge: to create in Lucca a space capable of comparing itself with the great contemporary museum centers, while maintaining a deep connection with the territory,” comments the president of the Fondazione Centro delle Arti Lucca, Alberto Fontana. “Thanks to the support of the city and the institutions, we believe that Lucca has all the characteristics to become a reference point for northwestern Tuscany and for the main contemporary art circuits, generating social, economic and tourism value for the entire community over time.”
“With the start of work, the Center of the Arts finally enters its concrete phase,” says the director of the Lucca Center of the Arts Foundation, Paolo Bolpagni. “The new center is born as an evolution of the experience gained in over forty years by the Ragghianti Foundation, and will be able to count on international relations, consolidated expertise and a long tradition of research and dissemination. The goal will be to propose authoritative and accessible programming, capable of relating different eras, languages and audiences.”
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