Palazzo Madama

From February 13 to August 25, 2025, Palazzo Madama presents the exhibition “Visit Italy! Tourism Promotion and Advertising 1900-1950,” a never-before-seen account of the compelling history of Italian tourism promotion, from the late 19th century to the early years of reconstruction after World War II, through two hundred posters, hundreds of guidebooks and illustrated leaflets.

Curated by Dario Cimorelli and Giovanni C.F. Villa, Director of Palazzo Madama, and with an installation by Emilio Alberti and Mauro Zocchetta, the exhibition traces the evolution of the tourism poster through the great protagonists of Italian illustration in the early twentieth century. From the first advertising testimonies signed by important names, such as Leopoldo Metlicovitz and the young Marcello Dudovich, who were joined by artists such as Ettore Tito, Ettore Ximenes, and Galileo Chini, to the birth in 1919 of ENIT, the National Board for the Increase of Tourist Industries, with which commissions began to follow different rules. From this time on, in fact, there began to be a preference for entrusting multi-subject promotional campaigns to the same illustrator-among them, for example, we find Mario Borgoni, Giovanni Guerrini, Marcello Nizzoli and Virgilio Retrosi-or to executors who remained anonymous, often linked to printing houses.

The exhibition, set up in the Senate Hall, is divided into five major sections that allow for a journey into the creation of the Italian imagination. Starting from the Alps and following the Apennine ridge, it will lead to the wonder of our islands and then back up to the Italy of thermal waters, the sea and beaches, entertainment and sports, health and the Belle Époque, discovering what would become the myth of post-World War II Italy.

We start at the end of the 19th century, when the growth of commerce and industry, along with the progressive prosperity of the young unified country, found valuable support in the birth and conscious use of new advertising and promotional tools. Thus was born the poster, which soon became one of the most effective means in this sector as well, capable of welding in images and words the cornerstones of Italian creativity, giving a fundamental impulse to tourism promotion. At the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seaside resorts on the Rivieras of Romagna and Liguria, renowned mountain and lake towns became the protagonists of advertising campaigns that, from city walls, echoed and anticipated summer and winter seasons.
As it developed, the tourism poster became a symbol of our country’s imagery, giving rise to iconic works capable over time of indelibly connecting the memories of travelers around the world. A parable that starts from the tradition of the Grand Tour and has in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a protagonist capable of making the Bel Paese a European fashion phenomenon since the release, in 1816, of the two volumes of Viaggio in Italia, becoming in fact the first travel blogger of the modern era and paving the way for two centuries of tourism success in Italy.

If on the wave of cultural travel the places initially most sought after are the monuments and ruins of antiquity-with Rome, Pompeii and Sicily becoming absolute protagonists-the development of means of transportation, first and foremost the railroad, brings to Italy a position of pre-eminence at the European level, facing a mass tourism that also turns overseas, with the American upper middle class invading the Boot and destinations such as Capri and Ischia transformed into true sanctuaries of the luxury vacation.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, tourism began to play an important role in the Italian economy and, after the dramatic halt caused by World War I-which reduced to a minimum the influx to tourist places and its various forms of promotion-the establishment of ENIT allowed Italy to plan the reboot of the country’s economy and, consequently, that of tourism as well. The Ente Nazionale per l’incremento delle industrie turistiche – closely linked to the Ferrovie dello Stato – is strongly desired by the Italian Touring Club and is in charge of the promotion, management and coordination of tourism and hotel activities dependent on the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Labor. An entity capable of bringing new development to the promotion of tourism in Italy and abroad, significantly expanding the reflection on the so-called Italian tourist attractions. Over the years, ENIT supported intense publicity activity with brochures, leaflets, maps and posters, promoting locations and artistic and sporting events. The rebirth of Italian tourism is thus entrusted to advertising art in what will become the golden age of the poster.

An illustration that is more ductile, economical and easily reproduced than photography, which has the task of evoking the most fascinating destinations with graphics. These are the years in which some of the most iconic posters of Italian advertising see the light of day: the views of Capri, Ischia, Pompeii and Naples by Mario Puppo; the panoramas of Portofino by Leonetto Cappiello; the Rimini and Padua by Marcello Dudovich. Authors of refined interpretations of an Italy that becomes a colorful kaleidoscope of desirable places and images capable not only of proposing a destination, but also a way of life, a totalizing experience.

In the exhibition itinerary, a video recounts the transformations of Italy along thirty years separating the first and last images.

Early 1920s, workers at work: bridges, roads, plants become symbols of the rapid completion of Italy’s unification and modernization. Early 1950s: tourists pose for a group photo.

In between, Italy’s tourism and new forms of collective recreation: sea, lake, mountains, art cities. Water sports, winter sports, summer climbing, motor racing. Fashion that adapts, customs – and mores – that change. And acting as a common thread, the impact of road and rail infrastructure, bringing new flows of vacationers and hikers from the cities to the great beaches, to the peaks, to the lakefronts. Until the postwar period, and the first forms of true mass tourism, including international: with Italy once again becoming a favored destination, preparing to embody, a few years later, the great dream of La Dolce Vita.

The video, curated by Jacopo Bulgarini d’Elci, explores all these aspects, resorting to period video-documentary sources from the Luce Historical Archives. Music from the period accompanies the selection of dozens of visual documents (from 1922 to 1954).

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Dario Cimorelli Editore with essays by the curators and Anna Villari.

Informazioni per la visita

• Admission included in the museum ticket
• February 13 – August 25, 2025

On the occasion of the refurbishment of the Textile Room, on Wednesday, February 26, 2025, Palazzo Madama presents an exhibition that recounts the close connection, material and symbolic, that links white, the natural color of silk and linen, to women.

Through a selection of fifty textile artifacts held in Palazzo Madama’s collections, six of which have been restored for the occasion and fourteen of which are on display for the first time, curator Paola Ruffino accompanies us along a centuries-long history that passes through minute embroideries, intricate lace, and arrives at the most iconic of women’s garments in white: the wedding dress.

Medieval linen embroidery, needle or bobbin lacework, and white-on-white embroidery are arts with which female hands have created masterpieces. This subtle and indissoluble bond spans the centuries and sees women in the role of authors, creators and keepers of tradition, refined users and patrons of fashion fabrics and accessories.

A highlight of white fashion is, in France and Europe, the late 18th century. The fascination exerted by Greek and Roman statuary inspired clothing that looked to antiquity. Young women adopt simple en-chemise dresses, held in at the waist by a sash; the cingulum model of married Roman women, worn high below the breast, initiates a fashion that will last for thirty years. The preferred fabrics are cotton muslins, silk gauzes, light satins, white or in minute patterns, like the china of tea sets.

Around this centerpiece, illustrated by dresses, miniatures, fans and women’s accessories, the exhibition explores the past and the future. To the 14th and 15th centuries lead back the embroideries of women’s monasteries, particularly from the German area and the Lake Constance region, worked in linen on natural linen cloth, where the design, made of simple but widely varied stitches, is outlined only by an outline in colored silk. A type of work that, because of the poverty of the materials and ease of execution, later spread to the secular domestic sphere, for the decoration of tablecloths and cushions.

In Italy, decorative motifs of medieval origin typically Mediterranean, such as birds, castles, and trees of life, outlined in white on ‘rensa’ cloth, a sparse and thin cloth, of which two rare examples are on display, possibly Sicilian or Sardinian, persisted for a long time on domestic cloths.

Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lace-making was born in Europe, featuring the finest white linens and the extraordinary skill of Venetian and Flemish lace-makers. A selection of Italian and Belgian lace borders and accessories illustrates the exceptional decorative achievements of this exclusively feminine art, which in the 18th century transcended the narrow confines of the home or convent and became organized into manufactories.

In the 19th century, the onset of mechanized production caused the loss of virtuosity in the manual art of lace-making, a virtuosity that reemerged instead in white thread embroidery on the thin batiste cloths and muslins of women’s handkerchiefs. Four splendid specimens illustrate the high level of refinement achieved by these accessories, decorated with embroidery work that, unlike that in polychrome silks and gold of the great ornamental and liturgical hangings and clothing, also practiced by men since the Middle Ages, always remained an activity only for women, even when practiced professionally.

The exhibition concludes in the 20th century with one of the themes that most closely unite women and the color white in our tradition, the wedding dress, with a 1970s gown, short, accompanied by a very special veil, an unobvious choice that reiterates the strength and persistence of the relationship between the image of women and the whiteness of white.

The selection of fabrics is juxtaposed in the installation with several works of applied art, including miniatures, engravings, porcelain, and bindings from the museum’s collections.

On the occasion of the new display of textile collections, Palazzo Madama is offering a meditative sewing workshop curated by Rita Hokai Piana on Saturdays, March 15 and 22 and April 5 and 12, 2025, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. All info on the website and in the attached press release.

Visit information

• Admission included in the museum ticket
• February 27, 2025 – February 2, 2026

One of the identifying masterpieces of Palazzo Madama’s collection, Cardinal Guala Bicchieri’s hood, has been remounted in Staffarda Hall embellished with the brackets recently acquired thanks to the crowdfunding campaign “Returning Home. The hood regains its polish.”

Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of 742 donors, the five Limoges enamel ornaments-metal elements with champlevé enamel floral decorations-that originally decorated the hood of the Vercelli cardinal Guala Bicchieri (1160-1227), have been acquired and displayed in an ad hoc rearrangement thanks to the exceptional contribution of a wide audience of enthusiasts and supporters of the historical and artistic heritage of the Civic Museums of Turin.

Informazioni per la visita

• Admission included in the museum ticket
• April 2 – September 8, 2025

The exhibition project Van Eyck e le miniature rivelate, curated by Simonetta Castronovo, curator of Palazzo Madama, and realized in partnership with the Department of Historical Studies of the University of Turin, opens to the public on Thursday, May 23.

The exhibition stems from the desire to enhance and deepen the knowledge of the collection of manuscripts and cuttings of the Museo Civico d’Arte Antica of Turin, consisting of 20 illuminated codices, 10 incunabula and a rich collection of 80 folios and cut-out miniatures, dated between the 13th and 16th centuries that are rarely exhibited because they are particularly delicate.

The project intends to unveil and illustrate to the public a patrimony that few people know about, placing alongside the showcases graphics that not only place each volume and each fragment in its proper geographical and stylistic context, but also open up insights into both the techniques of manuscript making and the materials used, as well as libraries in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and the circulation of books in this period.

Visit information

• Admission included in the museum ticket
• May 23 – September 8, 2025