The Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Fiorentino offers its museum public another exhibition, the second at the Gallery of Modern Art in 2012, opening just two weeks after that dedicated to Japonism in Italy.

This time Florence is the star of the show, which can be appreciated by its citizens and also by foreigners via an itinerary that guides us through the memory of how the city appeared and how it appears today.

49 paintings will be on display, all devoted to views or representations of the city from various perspectives: from the airy eighteenth-century visions of Giuseppe Maria Terreni to the romantic views of Giovanni Signorini through to the works of domestic atmosphere by Lorenzo Gelati in the full flush of the nineteenth century and the glimpses of city life in the bright tones of the macchia, such as the Mercato Vecchio by Telemaco Signorini. And then again, moving twentieth-century works in which the way of portraying the city is renewed, raising the individual monument to the status of protagonist: for example in the Chiesa di Cestello by Silvio Pucci and that of Santo Spirito by Orlando di Collalto.And then the squares and the adjacent streets, through to “Rosai’s interpretation of Via Lupo and Via Santa Margherita a Montìci and the work Il trionfo della strada, winner at the Fiorino National Prize of 1951, almost a pictorial translation of some description from Vasco Pratolini.” (S. Condemi).

The opportunity for the exhibition emerged with the return to the Gallery of Modern Art, after long-term storage at the former Firenze com’era museum, of 16 paintings documenting sites of a Florence that has disappeared or been drastically changed, along with 33 works devoted to the city never shown before, selected from the collections housed in the repositories of the museum.

The exhibition also provided the opportunity for various general or partial operations of restoration of the paintings, both those that have returned to the gallery and those selected from the repositories for display.

The event also features a parallel visual itinerary in the form of the artistic photos of Antonio Quattrone illustrating the same places portrayed in the paintings, shown from the same viewpoint and with the same framing of the view. These images help us to get a better idea of what places in Florence looked like in the past and in the present and give the catalogue, published by Sillabe, the unusual aspect of a historic guide to Florence between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.