Castelvecchio Museum

Castelvecchio is a red-brick fortress on the river in Verona, built in the 1350s by the Scaliger lords who ran the city. It became a museum long ago, but what makes it famous among architects is what the Venetian designer Carlo Scarpa did to it between 1958 and 1964.

Scarpa stripped away clumsy earlier restorations and reworked the whole building as a setting for the art, placing paintings on floating easels, cutting sightlines through walls, framing the old stone with concrete, steel and pale plaster. His most quoted move stands at a hinge of the building, where the medieval equestrian statue of Cangrande, a Scaliger ruler shown grinning on his horse, is lifted onto a raised concrete slab in the open air, met from below and from the side.

The collection runs to the painters of Verona and the Veneto, Pisanello, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini and Paolo Veronese, but here the display and the building are as much the reason to come.