Civic Museum of the Capuchin nuns

The Capuchin Civic Museum of Bagnacavallo is a municipal cultural institute, born in 1976 in the spaces of the former convent of the Capuchin Clarisse nuns of San Girolamo. The rich heritage preserved in the museum is divided into various sections: the Ancient Art Section collects valuable artistic testimonies from the 15th to the 19th century mostly coming from the area, with works of great interest by artists such as Bartolomeo Ramenghi, Andrea Lilio, Felice Cignani and Ferraù Fenzoni. The path of the twentieth century section is also fascinating, where pictorial masterpieces by Remo Brindisi, Virgilio Guidi, Ernesto Treccani, Enzo Morelli and many others alternate with the valuable collection of sculptures "Vittorio dal Borgo", which collects works by Medardo Rosso among others , Giacomo Manzù, Tullio Figini and Giovanni Prini.

But the museum is now known nationally as one of the most active realities in Italy in the art graphics sector, thanks to the intense research, documentation and enhancement of the language of engraving carried out constantly in recent years. The Museum's Cabinet of Prints today conserves a very rich heritage, which with more than 13,000 prints conserved is configured as one of the most important Italian collections on contemporary engraving. On the exhibition front, in particular, the museum is pursuing an important line of investigation into the greatest international artists who have been able to fully express their greatness through engraving: the major exhibition on Albrecht Dürer (2019) is only the latest in a series of successful exhibition projects that brought the art of Marc Chagall (2016), Francisco Goya (2017) and Max Klinger (2018) to the public's attention. Since 2015, the Capuchin Civic Museum has also been organizing the «Giuseppe Maestri» Engraving Biennial, an artistic event of national importance which in its first two editions involved more than a hundred contemporary artists between the cities of Bagnacavallo and Ravenna.

Still on the art graphics front, the Museo Civico delle Cappuccine recently inaugurated a highly innovative project based on digital technologies: the digital repertoire of contemporary Italian engraving. This tool collects and makes available the information files of more than 1,500 engravers and the catalog files (with images) of almost 13,000 graphic works conserved in the Prints Department. The database also provides other valuable tools for the representation of the significant facts of the art of engraving in our country, such as for example the monitoring of the main artistic awards that have illustrated, and continue to illustrate, the trends of this artistic language so ancient and of great expressive potential. The digital Repertoire collects information on these events, allowing not only to automatically reconstruct the memory of their attendance at these important events or the awards they have won in the artists' files, but also to reconstruct the recent history of Italian engraving and of its protagonists.