Milan. From romantic to scapigliata is the current exhibition at the Castle of Novara , until 12 March.

Through about seventy masterpieces performed by the major protagonists of nineteenth-century figurative culture active in Milan , the exhibition that the Municipality of Novara , Fondazione Castello and Mets Percorsi d'Arte are proposing for autumn 2022 aims to illustrate the changes that have taken place in the Milanese city between the second tens and the 1880s.

Milan. From romantic to disheveled it tells of turbulent decades in which Milan saw the fall of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, the establishment of the Lombardo-Veneto Kingdom and the second Austrian domination, the first popular revolts and the wars of independence which in 1859 would lead to the liberation.

The transformations that already in the Teresian era had begun to significantly modify its monumental and urban aspect had continued without interruption during the years of the Cisalpine Republic, the Kingdom of Italy, the Restoration and the Risorgimento and had made Milan a modern city , beautiful, crossroads of people, of cultures, of art.

An elegant city that would continue to renew itself even in the post-unification decades, think of the demolition of the Coperto dei Figini in Piazza Duomo (1864), the construction of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele and the creation of the Piazza del Teatro, in 1865 baptized Piazza della Scala, to the killing of the Rebecchino (1875). A culturally very lively city, frequented by foreign travelers and inhabited by a wealthy bourgeois class, but at the same time also a place where social differences gradually began to become more and more marked and in which a large part of the population lived in poverty.

The exhibition itinerary of the Milan exhibition. From romantic to scapigliata is divided into sections that follow the trend of the rooms of the Castello Visconteo Sforzesco and traces the evolution of Lombard painting from Romanticism to Scapigliatura , a cultural phenomenon born in Milan in the sixties that involved poets, writers, musicians, artists united from a profound intolerance towards the conventions of bourgeois society and culture.