Pasquale Revoltella and his museum: the patronage that gave Trieste Italy's first modern art gallery

Among the palaces of the Borgo Giuseppino, a few steps from the sea, stands the building that best embodies the spirit of nineteenth-century Trieste: the Museo Revoltella. It is not just a modern art gallery — it is the legacy of one man, Baron Pasquale Revoltella, who decided that his fortune, his house and his collections should belong forever to the city that had made him rich.

From humble origins to financial power

Pasquale Revoltella was born in Venice on 16 June 1795, the son of a butcher. Orphaned at an early age and given only a basic education, he moved to Trieste as a boy to seek his fortune. The city, a free port of the Habsburg Empire since 1719, was then a booming commercial hub open to merchants of every nationality and faith.

After an apprenticeship in the trading house of Théodore Necker, in 1835 Revoltella founded his own firm importing timber and grain. Success came quickly. The profits were reinvested in the city's major enterprises: he became one of the first shareholders of Assicurazioni Generali and, from 1838, a board member of the Österreichischer Lloyd, the empire's great shipping company.

The Suez vision

Revoltella understood before many others that Trieste's future depended on a canal not yet dug: Suez. A direct route to Asia would make the Adriatic port the natural gateway of Mitteleuropa to the East. He committed capital, diplomacy and personal prestige to the project of Ferdinand de Lesseps, becoming vice-president of the Universal Suez Canal Company.

In 1861-62 he travelled to Egypt to inspect the construction sites — a journey recorded in the album Voyage en Égypte. In 1867 Emperor Franz Joseph granted him the title of baron. He died on 8 September 1869, just weeks before the canal's inauguration: he never saw the work he had championed completed.

A will written for eternity

The heart of Revoltella's patronage lies in his holographic will of 13 October 1866. He left the city of Trieste his palace with all its works of art, furnishings and books, his country villa, and an endowment with a precise purpose: a capital of 100,000 florins, whose annual interest was to be spent in perpetuity on the purchase of works of art, chosen by a board of trustees — the Curatorio — appointed by the city council.

The palace itself was a manifesto. Built between 1853 and 1858 on what was then Piazza Giuseppina (today Piazza Venezia), it was designed by the Berlin architect Friedrich Hitzig — an unusual choice for a private citizen of Trieste, and a statement of the baron's European horizons.

In 1872 the municipality opened the Museo Revoltella: the oldest gallery in Italy devoted specifically to modern art. By the same testamentary disposition, a commercial high school was founded that would later become the basis of the University of Trieste.

The Curatorio and the international exhibitions

For four decades the Curatorio scrupulously followed the founder's instructions, spending the annual income — between 10,000 and 20,000 florins — on art. On average four to five works entered the collection each year; by 1914 some two hundred new pieces had joined the founder's collection.

The most important acquisitions were made far from home:

• At the Munich International Exhibition of 1892 the delegation bought the Marina by Böhme, After the First Communion by Carl Frithjof Smith and Morning at the Giudecca by Guglielmo Ciardi, soon followed by Luigi Nono's Ave Maria.
• From the first Venice Biennale of 1895 — where La derelitta by Domenico Trentacoste was purchased — the Venetian exhibition became the museum's main acquisition channel.
• At the Rome International Exhibition of 1911 the president Aristide Costellos secured works by Antonio Mancini and Ignacio Zuloaga.
• At the Biennale of 1914 came the masterpiece: Lady with a Dog by Giuseppe De Nittis.

Not every judgement was flawless: in 1890 the trustees let slip Segantini's The Plough in the Engadine, exhibited in Trieste — one of the great missed opportunities in the museum's history.

The twentieth century: Brunner, Scarpa and the modern gallery

The collection soon outgrew the palace. In 1907 the municipality bought the adjacent Palazzo Brunner, though it became fully available only decades later. In 1963 the renovation was entrusted to the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, who kept the perimeter walls intact and radically reinvented the interiors.

The works, interrupted many times and continued by Franco Vattolo and Giampaolo Bartoli, ended only in 1991. On 13 June 1992 the museum reopened with the exhibition From Canova to Burri, presenting about 350 works.

Revoltella's legacy today

Today the museum occupies three buildings — Palazzo Revoltella, Palazzo Brunner and Palazzo Basevi — an entire city block with some 4,000 square metres of exhibition space on six floors. The twentieth-century collection includes Casorati, Sironi, Carrà, Morandi, De Chirico, Manzù, Marini, Fontana and Burri.

The double soul of the museum — baronial residence below, modern gallery above — is the truest portrait of its founder: a self-made man who looked at Europe, and who turned private wealth into a public institution that still grows, year after year, exactly as his will prescribed.