The Museo Mallé stands in via IV Novembre, in Dronero, in the house that had belonged to Luigi Mallè's family. Born in Turin in 1920 to parents from Dronero, Mallè became an art historian, a university teacher and the director of important museums in Turin; alongside that he collected, with the widest possible curiosity. In his will he left the house to the municipality of Dronero so that his collection could be housed there, and the museum opened in 1995.
What to see
The collection runs from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, and is heterogeneous by choice. On the ground floor there are fabrics of the late sixteenth century and a polychrome wooden statue of the Trento school by Stefano Lamberti; for the seventeenth century, the Allegory of the Guardian Angel by Charles Dauphin and a series of Flemish and Dutch works. The eighteenth-century room shows Giovanni Battista Crosato, Francesco De Mura and Giovan Domenico Molinari, along with the rococo prints of Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner; the nineteenth-century room the landscape painters of the later decades, and the last room the painters of the twentieth century.
Visiting
The upper floor is given to Mallè's life, and here the numbers tell you what kind of collector he was better than any adjective: forty-two pieces of furniture and fittings, fifty-nine ceramics that come from China and Japan but also from France and Great Britain, 129 paintings and drawings made between the early seventeenth and the mid twentieth century, 204 photographs, eight nineteenth-century clocks, thirty-eight prints from between 1750 and 1890, fifteen works in glass. And then majolica, toys, opera records, a drawing room of the second half of the nineteenth century and a dining room in neo-Renaissance style.
Our editors' tip
This is not a civic museum built to a plan, it is a private house left where it stood. The rooms were not emptied and rearranged: the drawing room and the dining room are visited as rooms, not as display cases, and that is why the Mallè is worth the detour more than certain museums with better collections. The museum works a great deal with schools, and teaching is one of the activities it cares most about.