Set up in the former headquarters of the Bank of Italy, the museum houses the private collection of Italian and French 19th-century works of art belonging to the spouses Venceslao Di Persio and Rosanna Pallotta.

The itinerary, spread over three floors and fifteen exhibition rooms, begins with the international view of early 20th-century Naples, represented by the Austrian Joseph Rebell, and continues in the room dedicated to the Posillipo School with the leading figures Anton Sminck van Pitloo and Giacinto Gigante. It then moves on to the first monographic room dedicated to Domenico Morelli.

The first floor presents the Resina School and the Neapolitan school with works by Vincenzo Migliaro, Giuseppe Casciaro, Edoardo Dalbono, the Palizzi brothers, and Francesco Paolo Michetti (to name a few), as well as the two monographic rooms of Antonio Mancini, with seventeen works, and Michele Cammarano, with fifteen works.

After an overview of the artistic languages in the different regions of Italy in the second half of the century, from the south to Tuscany, Lombardy, and Veneto, the exhibition explores the relationships between Italian artists and the French painters of the Barbizon School. On one side, we find Antonio Fontanesi, and on the other side, the Palizzi brothers, Giuseppe De Nittis, Federico Rossano, and Federico Zandomeneghi, who lived or moved to Paris. The last section is entirely dedicated to the French artists, featuring Gustave Courbet, the main Barbizon painters – Théodore Rousseau, Narcisse Virgilio Diaz de la Pena, Constant Troyon, Charles-François Daubigny – and Rosa Bonheur. Of particular importance is the research on the choice of frames, ranging from the 16th to the 19th century.