What to see · Reggio nell'Emilia

More places of interest

• Galleria Parmeggiani

  The Anna and Luigi Parmeggiani Gallery is a museum in Reggio Emilia holding a collection of furniture, paintings, arms and textiles in an imaginative neo-medieval building in French and Spanish taste, today part of the city's civic museum network.

  What to see

  The building was commissioned in 1924 by the eclectic collector Luigi Parmeggiani, born in Reggio Emilia in 1860, who returned there after financial troubles in Paris intending to house his own collections; the design, by the Reggio engineer Ascanio Ferrari, freely echoes a French reliquary kept in the same collection, and the facade is animated by gargoyles, coats of arms and busts of Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Cellini. Already in 1926 several rooms were open to the public as a private museum and cultural centre, but in 1932 a financial collapse forced Parmeggiani to donate the building to the Municipality in exchange for a monthly income: the museum finally opened on 18 June 1933, and Parmeggiani curated its display until his death in 1945.

  The collections bring together three different groups: the Marcy collection, with arms and jewels partly authentic and partly 19th-century pastiches from the Parisian Marcy workshop; the Escosura collection, formerly belonging to the painter and antiquarian Ignacio León y Escosura, with textiles, garments and paintings of the Spanish, Flemish and French schools, including works that Parmeggiani, known for his fanciful attributions, presented as by El Greco, Van Eyck or Velázquez; and the Detti collection, twenty-three paintings by the painter Cesare Detti that came into Parmeggiani's possession through his 1918 marriage to the artist's daughter, Blanche, known as Anne. Falling into decline after her death in 1954, the gallery was restored from 1968 onward and reopened to the public in 1988.

  Visiting

  The gallery, with hours published by Reggio Emilia's civic museums, also hosts temporary exhibitions on the second floor, once the Parmeggiani couple's apartment.

  Our editors' tip

  Look for the triptych attributed to Van Eyck in the central hall: knowing that Parmeggiani often falsified the origins of his own works does not lessen the visit's charm — if anything, it turns the gallery into an ongoing game between authenticity and invention.

• Museo del Tricolore

  The Museo del Tricolore is one of the venues of Reggio Emilia's civic museums, set up in the town hall next to the Sala del Tricolore, and holds relics linked to the Italian flag and the Risorgimento.

  What to see

  The museum occupies spaces within the Palazzo del Comune, whose construction began in 1416 and which, in the 1770s, gained the large hall designed by the architect Ludovico Bolognini, originally intended as an archive and later used for meetings of the General Council. It was in this very hall, renamed the Sala Patriottica, that on 7 January 1797 the Congress of the Cispadane Republic approved Giuseppe Compagnoni's motion to adopt the three colours green, white and red as the national flag: thus the tricolour was born, the flag of the first sovereign Italian state to identify itself with those colours.

  The idea for the museum is owed to the historian Ugo Bellocchi, who in 1966 reconstructed the model of the first tricolour on documentary grounds; after an initial display set up in the 1980s, the current exhibition route was inaugurated on 7 January 2004 by President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, with a first section devoted to the years 1796-1814. A second section, covering the Risorgimento period up to the flag's centenary in 1897, was inaugurated in 2006, while in 2017 a section devoted to contemporary art was added, housing among other things works from the «Ninety Artists for a Flag» project. Among the relics preserved are the keys to the city given to Napoleon Bonaparte and the proclamation of 26 August 1796 that established the Reggian Republic.

  Visiting

  The museum, with hours published by Reggio Emilia's civic museums, can be visited together with the Sala del Tricolore, still used today for meetings of the city council.

  Our editors' tip

  Stop in front of the model of the first tricolour reconstructed by Ugo Bellocchi in the 1960s: a patient piece of historical research, carried out almost two centuries after the events, that gave the city back a faithful image of the flag born in this very hall.

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