Museo Carandente, Modern art museum in Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, Italy
Museo Carandente occupies Palazzo Collicola, a palace built between 1717 and 1730 by Sienese architect Sebastiano Cipriani on the west side of the piazza of the same name in Spoleto's historic centre. The museum opened in 2000 and was reinstalled in 2019. Its ground floor holds 1,500 square metres for temporary exhibitions, the first floor the noble apartment and the Carandente Library, and the second floor the permanent modern art collection in 18 rooms.
Palazzo Collicola was built between 1717 and 1730 by the Sienese architect Sebastiano Cipriani as the residence of the Collicola family. Its furnishings, paintings and tapestries were auctioned off when the family died out, and the Comune of Spoleto bought the building in 1939. It long housed the Istituto Statale d'Arte "Leoncillo Leonardi"; the museum opened in 2000 and was reinstalled in 2019.
The collection presents Italian contemporary art across different mediums and reflects how modern artistic expression has evolved over time. You can see works by artists exploring painting, sculpture, and installation as ways of creating meaning.
The museum occupies three floors of Palazzo Collicola: temporary exhibitions on the ground floor, the noble apartment and the Carandente Library on the first floor, and the permanent modern art collection on the top floor. The Carandente Library, on the piano nobile, holds some 30,000 volumes of exhibition catalogues, artist monographs and art journals.
The museum holds the only Calder Room in an Italian museum: one room is devoted to Alexander Calder, with the model and drawings for the Teodelapio, the first permanent monumental sculpture of its kind, made for the 1962 Festival dei Due Mondi, plus standing mobiles and a 1967 wire portrait of Giovanni Carandente.
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