From 7 March to 4 October 2026, Museo Novecento presents Ottone Rosai. A Poet Above All, an exhibition devoted to the Florentine painter and to the profound relationship connecting his work with the city, its landscapes and the intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Curated by Sergio Risaliti, the exhibition brings together for the first time in a single itinerary the paintings from the Rosai Bequest and works belonging to the Alberto Della Ragione Collection, two fundamental groups within Florence’s civic collections.
Around seventy works, together with letters and archival documents, introduce visitors to an artist who transformed the faces of his friends, the streets, churches, hills and outskirts of Florence into images filled with memory, unease and poetry.
Ottone Rosai and his Florence
Born in Florence in 1895, Ottone Rosai developed an essential part of his artistic research by observing the city in which he lived. His Florence, however, is not the monumental and idealised city portrayed in views created for travellers.
In his paintings, the streets, houses, hills and great Florentine buildings become inner landscapes. Rosai observes a silent and austere city, shaped by the presence of its inhabitants, everyday work and a strong moral tension.
Recognisable places appearing in the works on display include Brunelleschi’s Dome, Palazzo Vecchio, the churches of the Carmine, Santa Maria Novella and Santo Spirito, as well as Via di San Leonardo, where the artist had his studio.
The Rosai Bequest and the Alberto Della Ragione Collection
One of the most important aspects of the exhibition is the comparison between two groups of works belonging to Florence’s civic collections and normally displayed in separate sections of Museo Novecento.
The Rosai Bequest includes works from the painter’s studio donated to the Municipality of Florence by his heirs. It comprises views of the city, self-portraits and numerous portraits of the friends and intellectuals who were part of the artist’s circle.
The Alberto Della Ragione Collection, meanwhile, preserves an important group of paintings by Rosai within a collection devoted to leading figures of Italian art from the first half of the twentieth century.
Bringing these two groups together makes it possible to follow the artist’s development more fully and to understand how landscapes, figures and portraits all belong to the same poetic vision.
The faces of friends and intellectuals
The first major theme of the exhibition concerns the people who shared artistic, literary and personal experiences with Rosai. Poets, writers, critics, publishers and painters were not simply part of the background to his life, but formed a genuine intellectual community.
In the portraits, Rosai’s friends often appear motionless and absorbed in thought. Their faces are constructed with a few essential elements and seem to preserve affection, unease and moral tension.
The figures portrayed by Rosai include some of the leading personalities of twentieth-century Italian culture, such as Eugenio Montale, Elio Vittorini, Mario Luzi, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Giorgio de Chirico, Gianfranco Contini and Ardengo Soffici.
The exhibition also evokes the Florence of literary cafés, magazines, publishing houses, artists’ studios and long conversations that helped shape the city’s cultural atmosphere.
Florence as an inner landscape
The second major section of the exhibition is devoted to places. Rosai did not depict Florence with documentary intent: its buildings and neighbourhoods became reflections of personal experience.
Empty streets, walls, isolated houses, olive groves and hills seem suspended in an unmoving time. Even when famous monuments are recognisable, the painter avoids any celebratory representation and instead seeks the city’s measure, gravity and silence.
Via di San Leonardo, the Oltrarno and the edges of the city belong to a geography experienced through work, friendship, walks and everyday encounters. The real city is transformed into a landscape of memory and existence.
Why “A Poet Above All”
The title of the exhibition invites visitors to consider Ottone Rosai not only as a painter, but also as an intellectual and writer deeply connected with the written word.
The works are accompanied by a selection of documents from the Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G.P. Vieusseux and the Alessandro Bonsanti Contemporary Archive. Letters, testimonies and archival material help reconstruct the artist’s relationships with the writers and poets of his time.
For Rosai, painting and writing arose from the same need for sincerity. Faces, streets and landscapes are translated into essential forms capable of evoking the hardships of existence, solitude, friendship and the need to continue believing in poetry.
The dialogue with Georg Baselitz
The exhibition also establishes a connection with Georg Baselitz, the subject of another major exhibition at Museo Novecento in 2026.
The German artist encountered Rosai’s work during his first stay in Florence in 1965 and became a careful admirer of it. This comparison reveals how the Florentine master’s painting was able to speak to artists belonging to very different generations and contexts.
The simultaneous presence of the two exhibitions therefore offers an opportunity to explore the twentieth century through two distant experiences united by an intense, physical form of painting deeply connected with the human condition.
Why visit the Ottone Rosai exhibition
Ottone Rosai. A Poet Above All introduces visitors to one of the principal interpreters of twentieth-century Florence and presents the city from a perspective different from that of the usual Renaissance itineraries.
The exhibition is particularly interesting because it does not separate the artist’s work from his life. Portraits, landscapes, letters and documents reconstruct a cultural environment in which painting, poetry, friendship and everyday life were closely intertwined.
Visiting the exhibition also means recognising in the paintings places that still form part of contemporary Florence and understanding how Rosai transformed the city into a universal image of memory and human experience.
Include the exhibition in your Florence itinerary
A visit to Museo Novecento can be combined with the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella or with an itinerary devoted to the places associated with Ottone Rosai: the Oltrarno, Piazza del Carmine, Santo Spirito, Via Toscanella and Via di San Leonardo.
I am Giulia Bacci, an art historian and licensed tour guide in Florence. I can help you create an itinerary connecting the works in the exhibition with the streets, churches and neighbourhoods experienced and painted by Ottone Rosai.
