Between Carlo Levi and Guerricchio refurbished

The exteriors and interiors, new layouts and multimedia experiences, didactics and the bookshop: Palazzo Lanfranchi (as the National Museum of Medieval and Modern Art of Basilicata is known to everyone in Matera) reopens to the public after a long restoration process that has returned it to the city and tourists in a more welcoming and modern guise.

This can be seen from the façade, where the encrustations and blackened features have disappeared, the deteriorated portal has been brought back to life as have the sculptures and epigraphs, one of which is dedicated to the archbishop after whom the building is named (Vincenzo Lanfranchi), who commissioned its construction in the late 17th century. A former seminary, then a classical high school - Giovanni Pascoli taught there for two years at the end of the 19th century - the palace is worth a visit in itself, with its cloister, the high-vaulted spaces and the terrace overlooking the Sasso Caveoso. After its renovation, overseen by director Annamaria Mauro, it now has two rooms on the ground floor dedicated to Carlo Levi and Luigi Guerricchio (1932-1996) with two rooms offering images and sounds created by artificial intelligence (including Guerricchio's voice telling about himself). An innovative way of experiencing the works of the two artists side by side. There are works by Levi, to whom Lucania is linked not only for Christ stopped at Eboli, as can be seen from his pictorial production, that trace the different phases of his life (from his beginnings to his time in Paris, to his time in exile, to the following decades), with some portraits of the protagonists of our history, such as those of Leone Ginzburg and Ernesto Rossi.

The display, with panels and captions finally also in English, curated by Daniela Fonti (director of the Fondazione Levi in Rome), also includes the preparatory drawings for the monumental canvas Lucania 61, which offers itself to the eye, a little further along the route, in all its spectacularity, enhanced by more effective lighting and without the glass that once partially separated its surface. The work is a homage, created for the Centenary Celebrations of the Unification of Italy in 1961, by Levi to the Lucanian poet and politician Rocco Scotellaro, a fraternal friend, who is also present in one of the portraits.

The room dedicated to Guerricchio, set up by Maria Adelaide Cuozzo, tells of the Matera artist's relationship with his own city, where he returned in the late 1950s after having travelled extensively, taking up Scotellaro's request: 'If you want to be a painter, you have to look into the faces of our people, the people of our villages'.

Also completely renovated is the space on the first floor that houses the Camillo d'Errico collection (from the Lucania region of Palazzo San Gervasio, in the province of Potenza), curated by Professor Stefano Causa, with about eighty works from the 17th and 18th century Neapolitan period. The permanent exhibitions are completed by the section dedicated to the art of the territory. There is no lack of attention to children in this renovation, with an educational workshop equipped with touch screen tables and an original reproduction of Lucania '61 made with 220 thousand Lego bricks. Here and there, for example in the conference room or in the corridor that runs alongside the Levi Hall, the faces of Matera's men and women from the 1950s emerge from Mario Carbone's black and white photographs: expressions of another time, not so distant, recalling an experience that, on leaving Palazzo Lanfranchi, one imagines while gazing, enraptured, at the rocks of the Sasso Caveoso.