The state has acquired 30 works for the Rome museum and agreed to borrow another 90 from the artist’s archive. Two historians want the presentation to address Sironi’s fascist involvement.
Italy’s Culture Ministry presented plans on 3 November 2026, for a state-run Mario Sironi museum and study center in Rome, with an opening planned for the first half of 2027. Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli presented the project, which follows a 9 March 2026 agreement between the ministry’s museums and contemporary creativity directorates, the artist’s archive and the building’s veterans association.
The state has acquired 30 works from the Mario Sironi Archive for the permanent collection. The ministry says a further 90 will be made available under a signed free-loan agreement, allowing the museum to rotate displays and develop themed exhibitions.
Sironi (1885–1961) was an Italian Modernist artist active in painting, sculpture, illustration and design, and a founder of the Novecento Italiano movement in 1922. The acquired works include paintings, drawings and preparatory sketches from the 1910s through the late 1950s, covering his Futurist and metaphysical-influenced work, monumental projects and late compositions.
Sironi joined the fascist movement in 1919 and contributed more than 1,700 political cartoons and illustrations to Il Popolo d’Italia, Benito Mussolini’s newspaper. He also received large-scale state decorative commissions under the fascist regime and contributed to the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution.
The museum will occupy the Casa Madre dei Mutilati e Invalidi di Guerra, the Rome home of the National Association of War Disabled and Wounded Veterans, between Castel Sant’Angelo and the Palace of Justice. Inaugurated in 1928, the building contains two frescoes Sironi painted in 1938; one depicts Mussolini on horseback. Preparatory drawings for the building’s shrine are among the acquired works; the ministry says they connect the future exhibition to the frescoes preserved in their original setting.
Art historian Tomaso Montanari, rector of the University for Foreigners of Siena and a member of the ministry’s scientific committee, told The Art Newspaper that he did not oppose the museum but wanted its educational material to make clear that it did not endorse fascism. He said the initial project focused overwhelmingly on Sironi’s fascist-period work and that the ministry had partially heeded his request to include works from other periods.
Fabio Benzi, an art historian, curator and member of the museum’s scientific committee, told Le Journal Des Arts that there was a danger of legitimizing an authoritarian aesthetic under the guise of cultural rediscovery. The museum’s press materials do not mention fascism or Mussolini. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party has roots in Italy’s postwar neo-fascist movement.
The ministry says the museum will open after building adaptations, exhibition installation and accessibility improvements already underway under Rome’s special archaeology, fine arts and landscape superintendency are complete. It has given no exact opening date.
The planned study center is intended to give researchers access to correspondence, publications and other archive documents. An agreement to digitize that material is being signed, the ministry says.
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