Palazzo Abatellis possesses, in its collections, a nucleus of 19th century paintings, not exhibited or entrusted in storage to other public bodies, of which an accurate sampling is presented for the first time on this occasion. In the complex events that led to the dismemberment of the collections of the National Museum, already in the years from 1930 to 1937 - and therefore even before the birth, in 1954, of Palazzo Abatellis as the National Gallery of Sicily - almost all the paintings of the nineteenth century were already passed in storage at the Civic Gallery of Modern Art "Empedocle Restivo".

However, a certain number of paintings remained in the Gallery, both because of their mediocre state of conservation and because they - in years in which nineteenth-century painting, and even more the southern one, still enjoyed little critical consideration - were considered as a sort of reserve to draw upon for the requests of bodies and institutions for the furnishing of their representative rooms. These are works by painters, Sicilian and not, among the best known (Errante, Riolo, Lo Forte, Carta, Patania, Querci, Abbati, etc.) or less known (Arancio, Rindello, La Farina, Giaconia, Politi, Sottile , etc.), which deal with different genres - from history painting to portrait, from academic exercises to landscape, to interior scenes, to sacred painting - with high quality points and more modest, but no less interesting pieces under the historical and documentary profile.