The Italian Chapter of The Society for the History of Collecting
is delight to invite you to its forthcoming event:
Guided visit to the exhibition Le Meravigile del Grand Tour (Wonders of the Grand Tour), at the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Via Manzoni 12, Milan led by the exhibition's curator, Lavinia Galli
on Saturday 28 March 2026, at 10.00am-11.00am (CET), meeting at 9.45am (CET)
Museo Poldi Pezzoli presents “Meraviglie del Grand Tour”, an exhibition open to the public from January 30 to May 4, 2026, organized in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and in dialogue with “Tutti gli DÈI” by Ferzan Özpetek.
The outstanding highlight of the exhibition is Giovanni Paolo Panini’s monumental painting “Ancient Rome”, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of European paintings. Through his vision, Panini celebrates the grandeur of Rome as a symbol of timeless art and civilization. The painting arriving from the Met dates to 1757 and is one of the most celebrated examples of “metapainting,” in which the artist invents a sumptuous imaginary gallery displaying more than fifty of his own paintings and views of the ruins of ancient Rome—the genre that made him famous.
The dialogue between Panini’s work and the objects from the Museo Poldi Pezzoli—paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts—aims to evoke the experiences, curiosities, and discoveries that once defined travel to Italy as an essential moment in the education of beauty and antiquity. It was a practice rooted in direct engagement with history, artistic mastery, and the richness of an extraordinary cultural heritage. The exhibition is conceived as a true tour beginning with the loaned painting and unfolding through the museum’s galleries, featuring several precious works from the Poldi Pezzoli collections that have until now remained unpublished or never previously exhibited.
An extraordinary journey celebrating the museum’s collections and its benefactors culminates in the striking video work “Tutti gli DÈI” by the award-winning filmmaker Ferzan Özpetek. Through his refined artistic language, he offers audiences a Grand Tour across time, expressed through the powerful medium of cinema. This interplay between art and film thus becomes a bridge between past and present, memory and vision, creating an experience that invites reflection, emotion, and imagination. It is a contribution that confirms how the encounter between different languages and sensibilities can generate new ways of interpreting cultural heritage, keeping it vibrant, open, and shared.
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Lavinia M. Galli Michero, studied in Milano and Torino; she has a degree in Humanities, a three year long master in History of art and of decorative arts and a Ph. D. in History of Art.
Since 2000 she is curator at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan. From 1997 to 2000 she was Director of the Borgogna Museum in Vercelli. She teaches as visiting professor of Museology and Museography at the Catholic University of Milan.
Her first academic contributions were focused on Lombard gothic painting, although one of her primary interests is the History of Collecting: in 2024 she curated the special issue of the Journal of the History of Collections “Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli between Milan and Europe” with Silvia Davoli and Alessandra Squizzato. She was editor of the exhibition catalogue “Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli l’uomo e il collezionista del Risorgimento” together with Fernando Mazzocca (2011), as well as several publications on XIX century in Lombardy.
Lavinia Galli is a member of the Advisory Board of the Italian Chapter of the Society for the History of Collecting.
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The meeting point will be the entrance of the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Via Manzoni 12, Milan. The visit will begin at 10:00 am CET, so it may be helpful to meet at least 15 minutes before the start of the event. The guided tour is expected to last approximately two hours in total, after which visitors will be free to explore the museum independently should they wish.
The ticket price will be reduced to €13 for Society members, €15 for non-Society members and free of charge for ICOM members or those otherwise entitled (https://museopoldipezzoli.it/en/visit/info/). The guided tour of the exhibition is kindly offered by the curator, Lavinia Galli. Tickets can be purchased individually at the museum ticket desk on the day of the visit.
Registration will close on 25 March 2026.
