From Vasari’s 1560 office block for Florentine magistrates to a 5.3-million-visitor museum, via a 1737 pact that kept the Medici collection in the city and a 1993 Mafia bombing.
Museums & Exhibitions
Openings, restorations, acquisitions and the institutions that shape public access to art.
The 1980s Sistine Chapel cleaning that art historians still dispute
Gianluigi Colalucci’s fourteen-year restoration stripped centuries of soot from Michelangelo’s ceiling, funded by a Japanese broadcaster’s exclusive photo rights, and critics still argue it removed the artist’s own finishing touches.
Inside Pompeii’s Regio IX, where a third of the city is still buried
A flatbread fresco mistaken for pizza, a black-walled hall painted with the Trojan War and a bakery-prison with barred windows: what a new excavation front at Pompeii has uncovered since 2023.
Fifty years on, Milan’s Grande Brera is finally complete
Palazzo Citterio opened in December 2024, joining the Pinacoteca di Brera’s Napoleonic old-master collection to modern works once meant for a James Stirling design abandoned in the 1990s.
Two hundred years on, Turin’s Egyptian museum rebuilds itself
The world’s oldest museum devoted to ancient Egypt marked its 2024 bicentenary with a new OMA-designed Gallery of the Kings, built around Bernardino Drovetti’s 1824 collection and Ernesto Schiaparelli’s intact 1906 tomb find.