What to see · Gallarate

More places of interest

• Museo Arte Gallarate - MAGA

  MA*GA, the Museo arte Gallarate, is the modern and contemporary art museum of Gallarate. It was founded in 1966 as the Civic Gallery of Modern Art, to hold the works acquired through the Gallarate national visual arts prize, and by the early eighties it was already a nationally recognised museum. Since 2009 it has been run by the foundation named after Silvio Zanella, and on 19 March 2010 it opened in its new home, a complex of about five thousand square metres, with an exhibition devoted to Modigliani.

  What to see

  The collection numbers more than five thousand works, including paintings, sculptures, installations, artists' books, photographs, design objects and graphic art, from the mid-twentieth century to today. The route is thematic and revolves around three cores: art in Italy between the twenties and the fifties, informal painting and Spatialist research, and developments from the seventies to the present. Artists include Carlo Carrà, Renato Guttuso, Emilio Vedova, Ennio Morlotti, Afro, Lucio Fontana, Bruno Munari, Fausto Melotti, Dadamaino, Gianni Colombo and Studio Azzurro; works are often rotated, in dialogue with the temporary exhibitions.

  On 14 February 2013 a fire, which broke out during work on the roof, badly damaged the building but not the works, which were moved to safety in the storerooms; the museum reopened all its spaces on 19 April 2015 with an exhibition on Ottavio Missoni. In 2023 the Italia 2050 Research Centre was set up, with the library and the archives of MAC, Madì, Mail art and the Gallarate prize.

  Visiting

  The museum has an education department, active since 1998, with workshops for schools and courses for adults. Opening hours, tickets and current exhibitions should be checked on the museum's website.

  Our editors' tip

  Keep an eye on the exhibition programme: in December 2017 MA*GA hosted the first exhibition in Europe devoted to the paintings of the American writer Jack Kerouac.

• Museo della Società Gallaratese per gli Studi Patri

  The museum of the Società gallaratese per gli studi patri, Gallarate's local history society, is housed in the former Franciscan convent of San Francesco in Gallarate, known as the Chiostrino. The society, founded in 1896 to protect the local heritage, began with the restoration of the church of San Pietro, and the finds recovered then formed the first civic collections. In 1925 it was given its present home, and between the sixties and seventies it took part in many excavation campaigns in the Varese area, from Angera to Castelseprio, as far as Malpensa and Lake Monate; the museum reopened, renewed, in December 1973.

  What to see

  Half of the northern cloister of the convent survives, with its wooden-roofed portico and a small bell gable; in the courtyard are a Roman granite sarcophagus and two fourteenth-century columns from the demolished church of San Francesco. On the ground floor the archaeological section follows a chronological order: prehistoric finds from the pile-dwelling villages of the Varese lakes, material from the Golasecca culture and a dugout canoe carved from a single trunk, found in Lake Monate, perhaps one of the rare prehistoric examples to survive intact. Then come Gallo-Roman finds from grave goods, inscriptions and a seventh-century marble screen panel from the basilica of San Giovanni at Castelseprio.

  Upstairs the picture gallery runs from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, with a room devoted to the neoclassical painter Giuseppe De Albertis, a sketch by Cerano, works by Tanzio da Varallo and three sculptures by Adolfo Wildt. The first-floor rooms have wooden ceilings and seventeenth-century frescoes.

  Visiting

  The museum also has a library and a historical archive on the town. Opening hours and visiting arrangements should be checked with the society.

  Our editors' tip

  In the Manica Viscontea, the gallery with cross vaults and granite columns, is an early nineteenth-century draisine, the pedal-less ancestor of the bicycle: it is considered one of the oldest and best preserved in Italy, and was restored in 2025.

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