The Museo del Corso – Museum Pole stems from the Fondazione Roma’s desire to give the City an all-round museum institution, capable of placing the visitor at the centre in accordance with the principles of inclusion, commitment to the local area and cultural promotion that have always guided the Foundation’s work in the community.
Starting from 1999, the year in which the first exhibition venue dedicated to major exhibitions was opened, the Museo del Corso is now reconfigured as a true museum pole that ideally unites the historic Palazzo Sciarra Colonna – unique in its kind for the presence of exhibition and archive rooms (such as the Historical Archive) as well as the richness of the 18th-century rooms designed by Luigi Vanvitelli – with the exhibition spaces of Palazzo Cipolla.
The opening took place today and the idea will be to maintain a permanent collection at Palazzo Sciarra Colonna where artists of the calibre of Pompeo Batoni, Nicolas Régnier, Gherardo delle Notti, Pietro da Cortona, Giovanni Paolo Panini and Caspar van Wittel will be exhibited; to arrive at contemporaries such as: Giacomo Balla, Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli and Lucio Fontana; with a focus on those currently active, such as Matteo Basilé.
In the opposite Palazzo Cipolla, on the other hand, Marc Chagall’s masterpiece ‘The White Crucifixion’, which arrived in Rome on the occasion of the next Jubilee, will be on display free of charge until 27 January. The work, from the Art Institute of Chicago, comes to Rome for the first time thanks to the collaboration between the Dicastero per l’Evangelizzazione, the Pro-Prefect Monsignor Salvatore Fisichella and Fondazione Roma and represents a moment of great symbolic significance for the Jubilee, offering a message of hope and union between religious cultures.