Pinacoteca di Brera, ready Palazzo Citterio: with Brera Modern, Franco Russoli's dream comes true after 40 years

The restoration of Palazzo Citterio in Milan has been completed, handing over an important building to the city and the world after more than 40 years of ups and downs, false starts and bureaucratic hiccups. In fact, the Palazzo, acquired by the state in 1972 to become an additional home for the Pinacoteca, will be part of the Grande Brera itinerary: in particular, its spaces, covering more than 6,500 square meters, will be used to house modern and contemporary art collections. Only the final tests are missing, but the handover to the Pinacoteca di Brera is scheduled for June 2018. In the following months there will then be the setting up of the new Brera Modern section, which will house 20th-century and contemporary masterpieces.

All the rooms of Palazzo Citterio have been restored, both the eighteenth-century ones on the piano nobile and the underground rooms of the Stirling-Wilford project, as well as those of the 1970s, designed by Giancarlo Ortelli and Edoardo Sianesi together with the allore superintendent Franco Russoli: Russoli himself was the author of the “Grande Brera” project, which included the expansion of the Pinacoteca to the Palazzo Citterio site. The great art historian’s dream will therefore be fulfilled before long (although Russoli also envisioned Palazzo Citterio as the site of the repositories: this, however, was not possible for structural reasons). In essence, the Great Brera will have to wait until 2019: in fact, director James Bradburne has stated that it will take a year before the new venue is ready, and the inauguration is scheduled for the fall of next year. The palace, in fact, as the director himself pointed out, “now has to be transformed into a museum,” with all that that entails: planning the routes, the layouts, the facilities, setting up the security systems, transferring the works.

Work on Palazzo Citterio was undertaken in 2015 and funded by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage with 23 million euros allocated by the Interministerial Committee for Economic Planning as part of the “Grande Brera” program.

Pinacoteca di Brera, ready Palazzo Citterio: with Brera Modern, Franco Russoli's dream comes true after 40 years

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