With a major restoration, completed in 2015, Palazzo Cucchiari, home of the Giorgio Conti Foundation, has been returned to the city of Carrara as a venue for high-profile events and exhibitions, making it one of the province’s most vibrant cultural hubs.
The palace, built in 1891 by architect Leandro Caselli (1854-1906), is located in the San Francesco district and dates back to a period of great expansion, both economic and urban, of the city. The Piedmontese Caselli, a pupil of Antonelli in Turin, came to the city as a municipal engineer and, within a few years (1884-1892), created an impressive sequence of public buildings, from the Saffi schools to the Dogali barracks and the Politeama Giuseppe Verdi.
His figure soon found favor with the wealthy Carrarese bourgeoisie, and Caselli found himself working (among others) for the Fabbricotti, the Binelli and, indeed, the Cucchiari.
Cavalier Giovanni Battista, nephew of General Domenico Cucchiari (a leading figure in the wars of the Risorgimento and a senator of the Kingdom), presented the project for the palace, designed by Caselli, to the municipality of Carrara in November 1890, and his family retained ownership until 1930, when it was sold and converted to public use. First home to the Social Security Institute, it then housed a high school after the war.
The architecture is severe in its regular course, barely enlivened by the two large marble-carved balconies; the rather plain elevations are enriched by the projecting cornice, supported by large corbels interspersed with richly decorated panels.
Far more opulent are the interiors, embellished with frescoes and mosaics recovered during the recent restoration.
The Giorgio Conti Foundation, established in 2003 to give continuity to the ideas, both social and cultural, of entrepreneur Giorgio Conti, undertook a restoration project that lasted more than three years, with consolidation work (involving the vaults, ceilings and monumental staircase), and the restoration of all the pictorial decorations, hidden by an earlier whitewash dating back to the phase when the building was used as a schoolhouse.
The building has thus hosted an interesting series of events, including major exhibitions, held annually during the summer period. Among these it is worth mentioning at least the inaugural Canova and the Masters of Marble (June-October 2015), which brought sixteen marble sculptures from the Hermitage Museum to the city, including Antonio Canova’s Orpheus (1777). The exhibition Cities of the Grand Tour from the Hermitage and Apuan Landscapes from Italian Collections (July-October 2016), renewed the foundation’s successful partnership with the St. Petersburg museum, presenting forty-seven works related to the Grand Tour experience between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the subsequent After Canova, Paths of Sculpture between Florence and Rome (July-October 2017), focused on nineteenth-century sculpture, with works by Canova, Bartolini, and Thorvaldsen .
In recent years, after hosting a section of the exhibition Giovanni Antonio Cybei e il suo tempo (July-October 2021), they have enjoyed considerable success The Sea: Myth History Nature. Italian Art 1860-1940 (July-October 2022), and Novecento a Carrara. Artistic Adventures between the Two Wars (June-October 2023), which is credited with sparking interest in a period in which Carrara was a fertile artistic hub, where many of the greatest painters and sculptors of the time met .