Things to do in Montichiari, Lombardy: The Best Museums

The museum displays the donation to the Town of Montichiari of an important art collection of the Counts Piero and Luigi Lechi, descendants of the famous Napoleonic generals nd enlightened collectors from Brescia. In May 2005 they decided to link their names to a museum able to preserve and enhance the approximately 350 works of art including paintings, drawings, prints and porcelain which were inherited from their family or acquired in years of antiquarian research. The 14 rooms of the exhibition, full of comprehensive educational equipment, focus on paintings from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century with important works of the Lombard School, with artists such as Alessandro Bonvicino called Moretto and Giacomo Ceruti called Pitocchetto, as well as major episodes of seventeenth-century Roman painting (Gaulli) and Genoa (Magnasco) or Brescia genre painting.

The museum displays a selection of ethnographic findings, which come from the alpine valleys and plains of Brescia. They belong to a collection made in over thirty years of assiduous research by the Brescian painter Giacomo Bergomi (1923-2003). They were donated in 1999 to the Town of Montichiari. The collection, which is the most important in the province of Brescia, comprises six thousand items. It documents the historical reality of the local farming in the last two centuries. The first section aims to give visitors a reconstruction of the traditional cycles of the year (seasonal festivals and celebrations) and human life (from birth to burial), caught in their mutual interweaving as well as their links with the farming and forestry-pastoral activities. The second section presents the techniques of metal working and wood with a look at the ancient crafts of the carpenter, the engraver, the basket maker, the blacksmith and coppersmith.

The Pinacoteca Pasinetti is housed in an elegant neoclassical building where you will also find the Library. This was originally the site of a church in the Sixteenth Century. Inside there are over one hundred works painted by Antonio Pasinetti (1863-1940) who was born in Montichiari. When still very young, he moved to Milan where he became a sought- after portrait painter. He became a friend of Italian artists of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, including Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo and Arturo Tosi. The exhibition itinerary goes from elegant portraits for the Milanese bourgeoisie of the Belle Epoque, to the landscapes painted in the freedom of en plein air experience. It continues with the sensitive matter of social painting, dealt by the artist with intimate intonation. The second floor is dedicated to the relationship between sketches and finished works as well as the history of the family portraits.