The story
Italy's national gallery of modern art stands in a white Beaux-Arts palace near the Villa Borghese gardens, built for the 1911 exhibition that marked 50 years of Italian unification. The collection itself had been founded a generation earlier, in 1883, and moved here as the new building went up.
Its best-known picture arrived almost by accident. Gustav Klimt showed The Three Ages of Woman at that 1911 fair, where it won a gold medal, and the Italian state bought it on the spot. It has hung in Rome ever since, one of only a handful of Klimt paintings anywhere in Italy, a gold-ground meditation on infancy, motherhood and old age.
Around it spread almost 20,000 works across two centuries, from Italian 19th-century painting to Van Gogh's portrait of a gardener and Antonio Canova's marble of Hercules hurling a servant into the sea.
