Palazzo Madama and the Gallery of Modern Art

The Palazzo Madama houses to city museum. It is certainly a historic building which has been through many transformations. It started out as a Roman gatehouse - the diagram below shows its original form. Amazingly the two towers still exist incorporated into the current structure. It later became a medieval castle, then a baroque palace for the duchesses of Savoy and now stands as a museum, trying to display all those changes plus collections of medieval religious art, baroque painting and decorative arts through the years.

A particular oddity is that the front is baroque palace while the rear is medieval fortress. Truly two faced.

The entrance hall has displays on the history of the structure, showing off some of the archaeology of the place through glass floors

Upstairs one sees the baroque. A particularly unusual collection is of large statues created out of mixed media, specifically ivory and metal work

The playing cards and stationery here are all inlaid into the table itself in ivory

There was a temporary exhibition of fossils

And another temporary exhibition of the River Po

And after the Po exhibition I went upstairs to the decorative arts section

And from there one can climb up to the roof for panoramic views of the city. And the roof itself. You go into one of the two medieval towers built to form a symmetrical square with two existing Roman towers

I finished up in the garden, which is small but affords views up to the fortress walls

If you are wondering, this is a house for falcons!

And then back into the entrance way, and back into the baroque world. Brilliant staircase

My afternoon attraction, before Thibault joined me for dinner, was the Gallery of Modern Art (GAM).

 Modern here starts in the late 19th century, so there is plenty top enjoy without getting into bizarre bits of contemporary art. I started with a temporary exhibition of the works of Berthe Morisot, who was in the circle of the French impressionists. 

The gallery tried, rather than have a chorological treatment of its permanent collection which would start with impressionist works and end up with silly stuff that people just come to ridicule, to display works by theme. So for example, landscapes could encompass impressionist works like above to somewhat more abstract versions. Trouble with this is it ended up with some themes that were really not themes at all like "indistinct"

They also displayed some of their storage items, so not individually labelled but nevertheless out on shelves. To be honest this was where some of the best stuff was.

But you had to have some of the bizarre....

One of the sculptures I most liked was this bronze just outside the entrance called "Its so cold" of a boy dipping his toes into the water😊