The Milanese exhibition is present in 21 sections of which 16 are at Gallery of Italy and 5 al Museum Poldo Pieces. The works retrace the Romanticism through a series of particularly significant portrait and landscape paintings.
To present the exhibition is the President I emerge Understanding St. Paul John Bazoli which immediately introduces the concept of "Culture Project" initiated by the institution, in order to disseminate the Italian art of better known and lesser known authors, thus developing relationships both locally and internationally. “I think the time has come when it is legitimate for Milan to have dedicated this building to a museum. And this is how a new and important precious museum was born in Milan, which sees two extraordinary reasons, the first that the Galleria d'Italia is located between the Scala and the Palazzo del Comune, therefore in the very heart of the city. It is also important to underline that this exhibition sees active collaboration with the Poldo Pezzoli Museum located not far away. The second reason is that these buildings which were born as bank headquarters, now that the bank no longer uses them, seem to have truly been born to have always been "museums" - and he continues - "I want to remind you that in this location there are the permanent collections of the the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and precisely the latter period is the result of the relationship started over time by the Comit (Italian Commercial Bank) then represents president Mattioni. Finally he concludes his speech: "Valuing masterpieces of Italian art means expressing a national identity focused on values, therefore proposing even temporary exhibitions, it means helping to bring out national knowledge and a national identity that can help our country find itself again.”
The exhibition is divided into sixteen sections, each of which further explores the values of the Romantic period and bears witness to the sensitivity of the time. The exhibition itinerary begins in the section "A Window on Infinity" with Caspar David Friederich and continues to the stormy peaks, the Alps, the amazement of the night, the landscape. In the guided tour, the curator Fernando Mazzocca explained that "a romantic landscape is always a reinterpreted landscape" and the works of Romanticism demonstrate a human immersion in nature. Romanticists discover the value of the night. For this reason, 'an obsession with the moon' is seen in Romanticist paintings. Others, like the painting Veduation of Naples by Ippolito Caffi (1864, coming from a private collection) for example, they use nature, like a palm tree combined with a slightly oriental light, to reveal the story. Caffi himself evokes classicism with Interior of the Colosseum, in the same way that the Austrian Ferdinand George Waldmuller and his works of the ruins of Sicily evoke a new sense of a lost grandeur.
The portrait, 'the mirror of the soul', another theme of this exhibition, includes the image of the exhibition Meditation di Francesco Hayez which immediately gives us a reading of the political significance of the period, the discrete young woman with bare breasts holds in her hands a volume where "History of Italy" appears written in red which alludes to the blood shed by those who had fought in 1848 and a second inscription, the more revealing one, appears on the cross which is pushed towards the first floor. It is the date of the Five Days of Milan: “18. 19. 20. 21. 22. March 1848.”
Also notable are the two portraits of Manzoni in the room “Alessandro Manzoni. The Betrothed" which pays homage to the Lombard writer, while the "Redemption of the Miserables" room reveals the lowest of nineteenth-century society, the miserable, the marginalized and the boys forced to work, the two paintings Chimney sweep di Giuseppe Molteni.
The last two stages of the exhibition consist of “La Forza Del Destino. The Historical Painting " Romeo's last kiss to Juliet (Hayez) e The death of Francesco Ferrucci in Gavinana (Karl Pavlovic Brjullov) and "The Romantic Turn in Sculpture" (eight sculptures including Pische abandoned (Pietro Tenerani) e The farmer's orphan (Antonio Piatti).
