The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea was founded in 1883 on the initiative of the then Minister Guido Baccelli and is dedicated to modern and contemporary art.
The present building, the Palazzo delle Belle Arti (Palace of Fine Arts) was designed by prominent Italian architect Cesare Bazzani. It was completed between 1911 and 1915. The facade features exterior architectural friezes by sculptors Ermenegildo Luppi, Adolfo Laurenti, and Giovanni Prini, with four figures of Fame holding bronze wreaths, sculpted by Adolfo Pantaresi and Albino Candoni. The museum was expanded by Bazzani in 1934, and again in 2000.
The museum displays about 1100 paintings and sculptures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of which it has the largest collection in Italy. Among the Italian artists represented are Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Alberto Burri, Antonio Canova, Giorgio de Chirico, Lucio Fontana, Amedeo Modigliani, Giacomo Manzù, Vittorio Matteo Corcos, and Giorgio Morandi.
The museum also holds some works by foreign artists, among them Braque, Calder, Cézanne, Degas, Duchamp, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Monet, Jackson Pollock, Rodin, and Van Gogh.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.