Palazzo Merulana hosts the project Italian School. Contemporary painting and its circular spirit in historical time, conceived and curated by Gianluca Marziani, whose first exhibition will be Nicola Pucci. New Magical Realism.

The initiative will take place at Palazzo Merulana from April 3 to July 5, 2026. The start of the project is based on an investigation aimed at surveying the state of the art in relation to contemporary figurative painting production in Italy.

Reflection on Italian art of our days must therefore start from the universal matrix of the painting, operating on new synergies between traditional means and electronic and digital evolutions, to provide greater ideational support to formal processes, advanced projectuality, and, where necessary, technical input to be combined in aesthetic elaboration.

Within the surface of the painting, an iconographic genealogy has developed that manifests itself in the Fourteenth century and reaches our days. Painting is the seed that has borne the best fruits of the painting, a genetic code of which the local tradition is the custodian and which resonates in historic palaces, countless churches, archaeological excavations, warehouses, and storerooms.

The Elena and Claudio Cerasi Collection represents the Italian peak of a systematic and reasoned, qualitative and relevant collection. Browsing through it means going through the great Italian painting of the early Twentieth century, with a special focus on the artists who have animated Rome and its human theater. Palazzo Merulana has become its full expression, becoming the architectural body "in which the pictorial organs are arranged as apparatuses of a formidable artistic journey. The journey of a painting school called Italy."