Leonardo’s experimental technique made The Last Supper start decaying almost at once. A 1978–1999 restoration stripped away centuries of repainting, dividing critics between an authentic wreck and a lost masterpiece.
Gianni Berengo Gardin and the fight over Venice’s cruise ships
Over seven decades Berengo Gardin (1930-2025) documented Venice, Italian factories and psychiatric hospitals in Morire di classe (1969), before campaigning against giant cruise ships in the Giudecca canal.
The mountain Michelangelo mined: Carrara marble, quarried since Rome
Carrara’s quarries have supplied marble since Roman Luni and Michelangelo’s own quarrying trips; today diamond wire has replaced dynamite, but marble dust and mountain damage still divide the town that lives off the stone.
Gio Ponti and the tower too thin to be a slab
Gio Ponti edited Domus for four decades and, with the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, gave Milan a tapered 127-metre tower for Pirelli in 1960 that survived a 2002 aircraft strike and remains the city’s most recognisable skyscraper.
How a Paris newspaper page launched Italian Futurism
Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro had no art to back it up. Boccioni’s 1913 bronze, later cast on a euro coin, gave the movement its defining image.
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.
Inside the blue room Giotto painted for a moneylender’s son
Giotto’s 1303–1305 fresco cycle for Enrico Scrovegni broke with Byzantine convention and used ultramarine more lavishly than any chapel before it. It now forms part of a UNESCO site inscribed in 2021.
The Florence brothers who photographed a nation into being
Founded in 1852, Fratelli Alinari built a 5.5-million-image archive of Italian art and architecture that shaped art history teaching abroad, and passed into public ownership under Regione Toscana in 2019-2020.
The town that put a watermark on paper for the first time
Fabriano brought European paper its stamping hammer, gelatine sizing and first dated watermark in 1282, later supplying banknote and artists’ paper; Amalfi’s own rag-paper mills survive in a converted fourteenth-century mill and at least one working workshop.