work in the Palazzo Madama

During this time I'm not just working in the pottery-studio, I am a bit depressed for not being able to work with continuity in my work with ceramics. I'm waiting for a period of calm in working with my company for museums. Yesterday we finished the show "VoltaPagina 6" at the Museum of Palazzo Madama. In 2006 I worked at the opening of the Palazzo Madama Museo Civico d'Arte Antica di Torino, has been a long job, for me it was interesting, because the fourth floor of the palace have exposed part of the collection of ancient ceramics.

After the closure of the Museum in 1988, which was followed by a difficult and confused period, in 1998 the "Palazzo Madama Project" was approved. This introduced a series of operations that led to the reopening of Palazzo Madama on 15 December 2006. The restoration of the architecture and the new arrangement of the displays, which met the most modern requirements in terms of exhibitions, use and services, were carried out together with important restructuring work. A total of more than 150 restorers worked on the building and no fewer than 71 companies were involved in restoring the architecture and the museum collections.The visit to the museum now covers four floors, each of which illustrates a historic period.The collections of works from the early centuries of the Middle Ages are housed on the moat floor, in the Medieval Stonework Collection, with sculptures, mosaics and jewellery (including the precious Desana Treasure). They range from Late Antiquity to Romanesque.The fifteenth-century rooms on the ground floor, on the other hand, contain a tour that leads more or less from the Gothic period to the Renaissance, with paintings, sculptures, miniatures and precious objects (such as the thirteenth-century casket of Guala Bicchieri), most of which come from sites in Piedmont and date from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. In the circular room in the Treasure Tower, one of the fifteenth-century towers of the old castle, there is a selection of masterpieces, including the famous Portrait of a Man by Antonello da Messina, and the Très Belles Heures de Notre Dame de Jean de Berry codex illuminated by Jan Van Eyck.

The sixth Volta Pagina opens with an outstanding donation of
ancient books dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth
century. These were offered to Palazzo Madama in late 2008 by a group of Piedmontese bibliophile of the Associazione Bibliofili Subalpini. Their gift reinforces the Museum’s ties with the world of collecting in Turin which, over the years, has added many treasures to the Museo Civico.
The precious bindings donated by Marco Albera, Livio Ambrogio, Giovanni Chieli, Federico Lobetti Bodoni, Francesco Malaguzzi, Gustavo Mola di Nomaglio and Giuseppe Pichetto will remain on display for three months in the showcases of the Chinese Room on the piano nobile. In the closet-gallery next door, the Piccola Guardaroba, there is an educational display programme illustrating the instruments and materials used in bookbinding workshops, with tools, plates, and decorative papers kindly lent to the Museum by Francesco Malaguzzi, Luciano Fagnola, and Emilio and Vittorio Soave. The exhibition is small, but it offers the public great insight into bookbinding techniques, providing information that would be impossible to include in the historic showcases on the second floor of the Palazzo.
At the same time, in the graphics showcases on the ground
floor we are also showing a selection from an ample collection
of Renaissance bronze plaquettes. These are part of holdings
which have long been relegated to the storerooms of the
Museo Civico di Numismatica (closed in 2001). These items have been meticulously catalogued and, after an absence of 70 years, this has at last enabled them to make their return to the Museum.

works in storage

Here, I enter some photos of our work so as not to bore you with the Italian museums.