If you failed to notice the Museo del Novecento (Museum of the 20th Century) during your last visit to Milan, you’re forgiven. Amid the vendors, selfie snappers and mutant pigeons of Piazza del Duomo, the museum’s midcentury home of Palazzo dell’Arengario doesn’t scream “look at me!” quite like the square’s famously ornate cathedral or elegant shopping mall. But despite its small stature, this modern museum offers visitors a direct path to a very specific, essential side of Milanese — and Italian — history.
They weren’t kidding around when they named the place: The Museum of the 20th Century is nothing if not a product of the Italian Novecento, with construction taking place on the palazzo between 1936 and 1956 amid an ongoing effort to modernize the city. Though largely overshadowed by its neighbors and the recent wave of contemporary art museums like Fondazione Prada and Pirelli HangarBicocca, the Museo del Novecento has a crucial story to tell. As the museum celebrates its 15th anniversary this month, let’s explore why it’s worth a visit on your next trip.
All about the building
As the onetime laboratory for Benito Mussolini’s ever-growing ideology, Milan was not spared the modernization efforts underway in 1930s Italy, and the Palazzo dell’Arengario was at the center of the action (at least geographically). Originally designated as a new seat for local government, the Palazzo dell’Arengario physically and symbolically stands directly opposite of Giuseppe Mengoni’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II — a landmark of Unification-era architecture — by reflecting its symmetrical pair of structures built in the new, “rationalist” style to represent the transition from past to future.
Covered in the same pinkish-white, Piedmontese Candoglio marble used on the Duomo’s facade, the Palazzo’s top floors rise in starkly geometric arches similar to those found in perhaps the most famous example of Fascist architecture, Rome’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, above four dynamic, neo-classical reliefs by Arturo Martini which help tell the story of Milan’s rise to power.
With the fall of Fascism, the Milanese building played host to a number of organizations, including the provincial tourism board, before being designated for its current role in the new millennium. Restored to the tune of €28 million, the structure was reopened as the Museo del Novecento in December 2010, with noteworthy interior features including a view of the Duomo — illuminated by Lucio Fontana’s Neon Structure (1951) — that is as beautiful as any of the works contained alongside it.
The Gianni Mattioli Collection
The interwar period of Italian art remains controversial and, some argue, more relevant than ever for its associations with Fascism. As one of the most comprehensive collections of its kind on earth, the Gianni Mattioli Collection offers invaluable insights into this period. On loan to the museum since 2022, the collection’s 26 paintings and sculptures help bridge the gap between futurist and metaphysical art, starting in the permanent Galleria del Futurismo.
As Milan came to be the industrial and economic capital of Italy, poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto in 1909 with an aim to “liberate Italy from the weight of its past” by celebrating action, technology, speed and war. Works like Umberto Boccioni’s Materia (1912), ostensibly a portrait of the artist’s mother, blur the line between the human and the chaotic city that surrounds her, while several works from Fortunato Depero — whose greatest contribution to Italian society might be his design of the angular Campari Soda bottle — pop with a color palette that anticipates the Pop Art movement by several decades.
Inclusive of works from modern Italian masters like Amedeo Modigliani and Giorgio Morandi, and verging into the proto-surrealist Metaphysical Art movement most commonly associated with Giorgio de Chirico, also on display here, the collection does not shy away from the uncomfortable realities of the era, providing crucial insight into how such artists coexisted — even thrived — under Mussolini’s hamfisted brutism.
Meaningful gestures
Reflecting the futility of postwar reconstruction with a radicalism that still feels shocking, the museum’s permanent Gestures and Processes gallery sheds light on an era of Italian artistry that is less renowned on the global stage but no less worthy of contemplation. The work of Piero Manzoni, including Artist’s Breaths (1960) and Artist’s Shit (1961), showcase the late Milanese resident’s visceral parody of celebrity and commodification when the city was at the peak of its “economic miracle,” while works from Gruppo T, like Grazie Varisco’s Breakable Net “Four Parts” (1970), provide a bridge to the interactive, computer-generated works to come in subsequent decades.
Finally, sitting at the end of the hallway and easily overlooked is Maurizio Cattelan’s “Lullaby” (1994), which offers a gut punch in the form of two normal-looking stacks of bagged debris. But upon closer inspection, these pallets hold the remains of the 1993 terrorist attack on Milan’s GAM (Galleria d’Arte Moderna), which took the lives of five and destroyed a wing of the museum at the hands of the Cosa Nostra. Here, the artist reclaims and repurposes the rubble, adding a poignant turn to the exhibition.
More reasons to visit
With general admission only €5, it’s worth popping into the Museo simply for a few hours’ break from the winter cold or the crowds of holiday season shoppers. But the museum is active enough to merit visits all year long. The “permanent” exhibitions are, in fact, often evolving; FORUM900, the museum’s space dedicated to lectures and presentations, presents new work from young, emerging artists; and the occasional temporary exhibition livens up the museum’s limited floorspace.
If you go
Museo del Novecento
Piazza Duomo 8, Milan
Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-7.30pm, with extended hours on Thursdays until 10.30pm.
Closed December 25, January 1 and May 1.
