The story
In December 2019, gardeners clearing ivy from the outer wall of the Ricci Oddi gallery in Piacenza found a small hatch. Behind it, in a cavity in the wall, was a sack with a painting inside. A month later, experts appointed by the city's prosecutors confirmed it was Gustav Klimt's Portrait of a Lady, missing from the same building since February 1997.
The picture had made news once before. In 1996 a young student noticed its resemblance to a lost Klimt portrait of a girl, and X-rays confirmed that Klimt had painted the lady over that earlier picture. The theft came the following year, as works were being readied for a move to an exhibition nearby, and how the canvas ended up inside the gallery's own wall has never been fully explained. Today it hangs in the gallery again.
The museum around it is the gift of one man. Giuseppe Ricci Oddi, a Piacenza jurist and collector, gave the city his collection of Italian art together with a purpose-built gallery by the architect Giulio Ulisse Arata, which opened in 1931 beside a former convent on Via San Siro. Its rooms are lit from above, a feature the founder insisted on. Around 400 works follow Italian painting from the Romantic Francesco Hayez through the Tuscan Giovanni Fattori and the Alpine painter Giovanni Segantini to early 20th-century artists such as Umberto Boccioni and Felice Casorati.
