Works and artists

Treasures from Wunderkammer: the skull with coral from the Museum of Natural History in Pisa

The skull with coral is one of the most famous and at the same time most fascinating artifacts in the Natural History Museum of Pisa, which is housed at the Certosa di Calci. The skull, presumably dated to a period between the 16th and 17th centuries...
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Vallo di Nera, between Franciscan frescoes and movements of ancient popular devotion

Sunday morning of a cold and strange December, and the alleys of Black Wall are empty. There is no travel guidebook that forgets to mention this sandstone village in the lists of must-see places in the Valnerina. Orange flag, Borghi più belli ...
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Davide Benati, the poetry of a translocated nature that flourishes on a humus of paper and canvas

To visit an artist's studio is to have the privilege of being invited into a secret garden, into which one must tiptoe so as not to disturb the subterranean germination of the works to come, which hover there in little more than a potential state. Th...
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Administrative documents on pottery from ancient Egypt: the ostrakas of Oxyrhynchus

The Egyptological Collections of theUniversity of Pisa, part of the Athenaeum Museum System, preserve a most precious treasure for the study of Egyptian society: they are the ostrakas of Ossirinco, which represent an extraordinary body of historical,...
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Why do we like landscape painting?

Writing to his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo in mid-July 1890, a few days before he died, Vincent van Gogh said he had painted three large canvases, three "expanses of wheat fields under turbulent skies," and said he had painted them trying to lo...
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The Prato Textile Museum: the history of the textile industry

In the English writer Iris Origo's fine book The Merchant of Prato, dedicated to Francesco Datini, an extraordinary merchant active in the 14th century, the author writes, "It was once said in Prato that if anyone cared to look under the foundations ...
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Between history and the avant-garde, Enrico Cagianelli's Umbrian Nativity.

There was a time in the history of Italy when putting up a Christmas tree was a custom looked upon with suspicion: it was the 1930s, and Fascism was concerned with discouraging what is perhaps today the most beloved Christmas decoration, on the groun...
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If an archive becomes a video game, a digital journey into a dream: the Enzo Cucchi Archive

When we think of an archive, the image that looms before our eyes is that of an orderly, quiet place filled with shelves and catalogs. A static place, designed to preserve and hand down. Cuccchi, Enzo Cucchi's digital archive, on the other hand, is t...
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The Malatesta Temple in Rimini, the Renaissance dream of Sigismondo Malatesta

It feels like entering a pagan temple. Or a sumptuous noble residence, if you prefer. When one enters the Malatesta Temple, one immediately gets the distinct impression that the glory of the Christian pantheon was not exactly high on the list of prio...
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The first pc in history: the Olivetti Programma 101, an Italian masterpiece of engineering and design

Among the display cases at the Museo degli Strumenti di Calcolo inPisa, one of the institutes of theUniversity of Pisa's Sistema Museale d'Ateneo , it is possible to come across an extraordinary relic from the history of computing, Olivetti's Program...
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Cen Long, a dissident outsider in contemporary Chinese art

Zeng Fanzhi, Zhuang Hui, Chen Zhen, Liu Wei, Liu Bolin, Sun Yuan and Peng You, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Cai Guoqiang, Chen Zhen, Huang Yongping: these are probably the first names of artists that the Western art-loving public considers as the most represe...
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The Pietro Aldi Cultural Pole in Saturnia: a model of good musealization

Italy is a land of museums: from North to South, passing through the islands, there are more than 4,000 (in some rankings even close to 5,000) museum institutions that open their doors to the public, thus bringing the Belpaese to be one of the nation...
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Correggio's Adoration of the Child: an intimate and universal scene of the miracle of the Nativity

There is all the essence of Christmas, understood as birth, in the Madonna in Adoration of the Child by Antonio Allegri, known as Correggio (Correggio, c. 1489 - 1534) from his hometown in the lower Reggio area. An intimate and collected scene but at...
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Viboldone Abbey, monastic peace amid the chaos of Milan's suburbs

On the one hand, the high-rise buildings of San Giuliano Milanese, the results of the 'building expansionism of the 1960s, the straight line of the railroad, the sequence of banks, grill shops, driving schools, turkish kebabs, hairdressers, furniture...
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When art in the Renaissance was also political propaganda: Garofalo's masterpiece

It is an episode in the history of the Renaissance perhaps not known to many, but certainly the Battle of Polesella can be counted among the most singular ones, and not only because in the aftermath of this Ferrara military feat, events ensued that l...
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When Donatello and Masaccio agreed on the Renaissance revolution in Pisa.

The Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa holds a very special record: it is the only museum in the world where, in the same building, it is possible to see a work by Donatello and a work by Masaccio, that is, by the father of Renaissance sculpture a...
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