Seventy years after the historic exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 1953 , the MAN in Nuoro pays homage to a work that bears witness to its era, but bears a universal message, still tragically current today. A hymn against the horror of all wars.

The exhibition also celebrates the first Picasso exhibition which saw the complete series of the Vollard Suite presented twenty years ago at the MAN in Nuoro , in collaboration with the Reina Sofía in Madrid, also a partner in this important new project.

From 23 September to 31 December 1953, Guernica was exhibited in the Sala delle Cariatidi of the Palazzo Reale in Milan, together with more than three hundred other works by the Spanish master, giving shape to the largest Picasso retrospective ever held in Italy. Subsequently the exhibition was moved to Rome, but in a reduced format and above all without Guernica, which since then never entered our country again. War World, thus amplifying the meaning of the work, hosted on that occasion also other dramatic compositions explicitly denouncing the disasters of war such as the Massacre in Korea and Carnaio.

Today Guernica no longer travels, never leaves Spain or its hall at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. It will never return to Paris, where it was created, commissioned by the Spanish republican government for the Universal Exhibition of 1937, it will never return to the MoMA in New York where it spent a good part of its exile before returning to its homeland. And he will certainly never return to Italy. Seventy years after the historic exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, the MAN in Nuoro celebrates the Italian passage of Guernica, symbolically and artistically fundamental for a generation of artists, art critics and citizens Italians.