The Attolico Collection, the result of decades of acquisitions of works first by Tommaso Lucherini (1891-1967) and then by his daughter Bianca Attolico (1931-2020), consists of approximately 500 works including sculptures and paintings ranging from artists of the 1920s (de Chirico, Balla, Sironi, Pirandello, Morandi, Mafai) to Neoavantgarde artists (Schifano, Pascali, De Dominicis, Manzoni, Mattiacci, Boetti, Mauri), Arte Povera (Calzolari, Kounellis), up to conceptual artists (Kosuth, LeWitt, Agnetti, Mochetti), exponents of the San Lorenzo School (Ceccobelli, Bianchi, Dessì, Nunzio, Gallo) or protagonists of our days (Kentridge, Sierra, Vezzoli, Muniz, Cattelan, Beecroft), just to name a few.

Already temporarily exhibited in public spaces in the past, following the formalisation of a loan agreement between the Municipality of Spoleto and Elena and Lorenzo Attolico (Bianca’s children and current managers of the collection, Elena also being the President of the Friends of Palazzo Collicola), part of the collection will now be housed in Palazzo Collicola in some rooms along the route of the ‘G. Carandente’ Gallery of Modern Art in Spoleto.

For its inauguration, a nucleus of works by important Italian artists not present in the museum’s permanent collection was selected, in agreement with the museum’s Director, Marco Tonelli, and thanks to the critical apparatus by Lorenzo Fiorucci and Davide Silvioli, tracing a synthetic and illustrative path of Italian art from the mid-1950s to the present day. By means of works by 11 artists (Burri, Castellani, Manzoni, Alviani, Agnetti, De Dominicis, Kounellis, Schifano, Vezzoli, Campanini and Arienti), the intention was to construct, without obviously philological aims but as exemplary cases, a path of modernity, innovation and experimentation that constituted the best Italian research in the artistic sphere, almost as if to form a multiform but equally eccentric and visionary gaze on the part of artists who are historicised or, as they are still living, undoubtedly destined to be so.

Of each of the selected artists, works have been chosen that can represent them in an unambiguous way, that is, according to those formal and linguistic traits that have distinguished their poetics despite the different styles, materials and periods in the course of their activity.

A true collection within a collection, therefore, that ideally covers, with works created between 1965 and 2002, the physiological “lacks” of the Gallery of Modern Art of Spoleto and that at the same time allows us to review works by protagonists of modern and contemporary Italian art, placed in a historical continuity and comparison with the works in the permanent collection of Spoleto, including Leoncillo, Pascali, Ceroli, Accardi, Griffa, Lo Savio, Mochetti, LeWitt, Calder, Pepper, Moore, Caro, David Smith.

Opening hours:
Wednesday to Monday 10.30-13.00 / 15.30-19.00