Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery

The Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery is a Piacenza art gallery dedicated to modern art paintings.

The Gallery was founded by the Piacenza collector Giuseppe Ricci Oddi (1868 - 1936) who, having returned to Piacenza in 1897, after having sustained law studies in Rome and Turin, decided to furnish the family palace, which was considered too bare.

The sculptor Oreste Labò, the accountant Carlo Pennaroli and the Milanese merchant Giovanni Torelli, among others, help him find suitable works by contemporaries. Collects about 100 works until 1915 and continues even after the end of the First World War. The collection includes only works from Romanticism and later periods.

In 1913 he looks for a building to arrange his collection to donate to the community. The Municipality gave him a piece of land on which he had the building built at his own expense, completed in 1931 and the inauguration of which the then princes of Piedmont Umberto and Maria Josè di Savoia took part in.

The choice of suitable land was up to the architect Giulio Ulisse Arata who was also the designer of the building, according to the wishes of Ricci Oddi who wanted it to be similar to a Renaissance building, connected to the remains of the old monastery of S. Siro.

The Museum now has more than four hundred works arranged according to regional criteria, to which are added monographic rooms.

It also owns, together with the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome and the International Gallery of Modern Art of Cà Pesaro in Venice, one of only three Klimts in Italy.

Map: Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery