The story
Just behind the long brick wing of the Castello di Rivoli, on a hill west of Turin, stands a Provençal-style villa built in the 1960s by Federico Cerruti, a Turin industrialist who made his money binding books. Over some 45 years he filled it with about 300 paintings and sculptures, yet he rarely stayed there. By one account he spent a single night in the house, coming on Sundays to read and look. Since 2019 the collection has been open through the castle museum, so a museum of contemporary art now shows a Sassetta and a Pontormo, Modigliani's Woman in a Yellow Dress of 1918 and Renoir's Jeune fille aux roses of 1897, the last picture Cerruti bought.
The castle itself is the stranger sight. It was a residence of the Savoy dukes, and in 1715 their architect Filippo Juvarra planned a vast rebuilding that was never finished. What survives is a block with an unfinished atrium of bare brick and, beside it, the Manica Lunga, a long, narrow gallery wing from the 17th century.
By the late 1970s water was bringing down ceilings and stucco. The Piedmont region took the building on, and the architect Andrea Bruno restored it with steel and glass additions that leave the old fabric in view, including a staircase hung in the void and a lookout jutting from the brick wall. The museum opened on 18 December 1984, billed as Italy's first museum of contemporary art, and its own collection, strong in Arte Povera, is shown in rooms that still keep their Baroque frescoes and stucco.
