De Lieto Palace

The idea of creating an art gallery dedicated to Angelo Brando, the most illustrious son of the city of Maratea, took shape following the first anthological exhibition that was set up in 1985 - on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the artist's death - at Villa Tarantini on the initiative of the Maratea Cultural Center, now named after Josè Mario Cernicchiaro, who was one of its most active founders.

The project went ahead with the acquisition in 1987 of Palazzo De Lieto, near the birthplace of the Marateota painter, on the initiative of Francesco Sisinni, at the time Director General of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage.

Assigned to the Superintendence for Environmental and Architectural Heritage of Basilicata, which started a complex and long restoration work transforming the ancient "senodochio" into a museum structure, the building was inaugurated in 1998 with the preparation on the ground floor of the temporary exhibition curated by the archaeologist Paola Bottini, Maratea: from land to sea, with the display of ancient anchors and copies of amphorae for the transport of wine and oil by sea.

However, it was on the occasion of the exhibition Lucan Painters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, curated by the Superintendent for the Historical Artistic Heritage of Basilicata Salvatore Abita and set up in the newly created Provincial Art Gallery of Potenza in June 2002, that the project for the "Angelo Brando Art Gallery" returned to be at the center of the ministerial programs and of the internal debate within the public opinion of the city, which was questioning itself on “what to do” in Palazzo De Lieto.

Decisive for the birth of the Pinacoteca was the willingness of Mrs. Angelina Mastroluca (the painter's only heir, having married his nephew) to dispose of a large number of paintings (34 works covering the time span 1909 - 1946), to which they were added four other paintings, two plaster sculptures, scattered sheets of a sketchbook and some relics that belonged to the artist's family, on loan from the Cultural Center JM Cernicchiaro Maratea, ASP Potenza and Tina Polisciano.

Another piece of this long administrative process was the traveling exhibition Angelo Brando. Selected works. Proposals for a museum, curated by Michele Saponaro, with a critical text by Isabella Valente, set up in Matera in 2007 on the occasion of the IX Culture Week of MiBAC and subsequently also exhibited in Potenza and Maratea.