The story
Across Piazza della Scala from the opera house, a bank keeps its art collection in its own palaces. The Gallerie d'Italia opened here in 2011, showing works owned by Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy's largest banking group, and by the Fondazione Cariplo, a Milanese foundation. The museum fills four linked buildings, among them the former head office of the Banca Commerciale Italiana.
The main route runs through two older houses, Palazzo Anguissola and Palazzo Brentani, and tells the 19th century in about 200 works, most of them Lombard. It opens with thirteen plaster reliefs by Antonio Canova, the Neoclassical sculptor, showing scenes from Homer, Virgil and Plato. Next come the history paintings of Francesco Hayez, the leading Romantic painter in Milan, among them The Two Foscari, painted between 1838 and 1840, the last farewell of a Venetian doge's son before exile. Further on are views of the Duomo and of the Navigli, the city canals, painted before most of them were filled in.
The route ends with Umberto Boccioni in the years just before he became a Futurist. His Officine a Porta Romana of 1910 shows new factories and tenements on the edge of Milan at midday, built up from small strokes of separate colour.
