One of the most important and comprehensive retrospectives on the Macchiaioli realized in the last decades, curated by the three most authoritative Italian experts of the movement: Francesca Dini, Elisabetta Matteucci, and Fernando Mazzocca.

With over a hundred works on display, the exhibition project represents a moment of recovery, reflection, and enhancement of a fundamental fragment of art history that has built the common cultural roots of our country, through a new and more in-depth reading of the exhilarating experience of the Macchiaioli.

Promoted by the Municipality of Milan, produced by Palazzo Reale, 24 ORE Cultura - Gruppo 24 ORE, and Civita Mostre e Musei, the exhibition, open to the public starting from February 3, 2026, counts the Matteucci Institute of Viareggio as a partner institution and involves the most important Italian museums that house the works of the Macchiaioli as lenders, such as the Civic Museum Giovanni Fattori of Livorno, the Academy of Fine Arts and the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Uffizi Galleries and Palazzo Pitti, the Museum of the Risorgimento and the Gallery of Modern Art of Milan, the Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Turin, as well as numerous private collections.

Through nine sections, the path reconstructs the brief but intense experience of the Macchiaioli, telling the "national" experiment, or the Risorgimento project of cultured painters who recognized themselves in the ideas of Mazzini as well as in the demands of Positivism coming from France and who fought passionately to change society through their art, in a favorable historical moment like that of the Italian unification. Silvestro Lega, Giovanni Fattori, Vincenzo Cabianca, Odoardo Borrani, Telemaco Signorini, Giuseppe Abbati, and Raffaello Sernesi... thanks to their most significant works, the individual personalities of these young painters emerge along the exhibition path, in which the cult of reason translated into the cult of the real, and under this banner they fought with determination to reconnect art to reality, to life.