An exhibition venue for modern and contemporary visual arts since 1997, the palace’s permanent collection, rearranged on the first floor in the spring of 2011, consists of civic oddments, acquisitions and donations that present artists and trends from the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Many of the artists are related to Pistoia by birth or adoption but work in the national panorama of abstract and informal art, such as Mario Nigro, Gualtiero Nativi and Agenore Fabbri. One of the rooms has the large-sized paintings and special projects by Fernando Melani, for which there was no space in his historic house museum and studio in Corso Gramsci (see list). The museum itinerary also includes the works donated to the Municipality by artists participating since 1990 in solo shows or anthologies in Palazzo Fabroni (among others Roberto Barni, Enrico Castellani, Giuseppe Chiari, Jannis Kounellis, Claudio Parmiggiani, Renato Ranaldi, and Gianni Ruffi).

ADMISSION FREE WHIT PASS

The historic house museum and studio of Fernando Melani (1907–1985) holds a singular place in the Civic Museum organization, being acquired by the Municipality in 1987 and inaugurated in 1996 after a careful restoration that respected its complexity. Here is a collection of 2,800 works —  “experiences”, as the artist would call them — in a continuum between domestic and creative spaces, a microcosm permeated with poetry testifying to a journey of research that took place strictly between the domestic walls, from after the war till his death. Melani began to paint in the  twentieth-century landscape genre, then shifted towards Arte Povera, Conceptual Art and Minimal Art.

The visit wending round subsided heaps of material follows a richly suggestive itinerary: the works occupy the ceilings, the walls, and the floors; they spill out onto the landings, and are even stretched out like laundry in the library.

The historic museum house and atelier of Sigfrido Bartolini (1932–2007) brings together his occupations as artist, collector and writer.

The rooms illustrate Bartolini’s passion for Classical antiquity through numerous plaster casts, which are mixed with samples of folk-styled terracotta works, collected as an aid to the real and primitive sensibility of his own monotypes, xylographs and clean and essential landscape view-paintings.
“My home is like one of my pictures, I know it brush-stroke by brush-stroke”, wrote Bartolini in his diary Disperata felicità (1954–2004): the tools and presses allow the visitor to indulge in the illustrated tale of Pinocchio; the works hanging on the walls by Sironi, De Chirico, Soffici, and Viani, to understand the company the master kept — the copious evidence of it all, preserved too in the library and in the archive.

The birth city of the artist (1901–1980) hosts the Foundation, the Documentation Centre and the Museum in the convent complex of the Tau.

A significant nucleus of works (sculptures, paintings, and plaster casts) is arranged along thematic lines, showing the gradual reduction of form from a rough lathe, an archaic object of the 1930s, to more fragmented, geometrical profiles, traversed by the rather tragic expressiveness of the 1940s.
The convent’s central cloister, the museum atrium, leads to the rooms where the themes so loved by Marino are illustrated. Beyond any doubt, the subject he was most fond of was a knight, which — he writes — reflects “the whole history of humanity and nature”.
The curvaceous figure of the Pomona, symbol of a simple rustic and primitive world, is another favourite theme suited to the temperament of an artist who declared he felt “Etruscan”. The history of the twentieth century is covered through the portraits. Finally, the beloved theme of the jugglers is a metaphor of the existential research for an unattainable balance between pleasures and duties, life and death. But perhaps the most fascinating corner is the gallery of plaster casts, consisting of over 100 pieces treated with colour by an artist who believed these sculptural works to be “finite”. The visit ends in the adjacent fourteenth-century church, which has some of Marini’s monumental sculptures, such as the Miracle of 1953 and Shout from 1962.

ADMISSION FREE