Palazzo Merulana hosts the Scuola Italiana project, inaugurated by Fondazione Elena e Claudio Cerasi in partnership with CoopCulture, and conceived and curated by Gianluca Marziani. The first exhibition features Palermo-based painter Nicola Pucci and runs from April 3 to July 5, 2026. Gianluca Marziani, born in Milan in 1970, lives in Rome and Ibiza. He is the artistic director of SAM Street Art Museum, RNA Roma New Art Academy, and has held curatorial roles across major institutions and festivals. His extensive practice includes scholarship on Banksy, rapid publication output, and ongoing collaboration with media and institutions worldwide.
The initiative at Palazzo Merulana emerges from an inquiry aimed at surveying the current state of figurative painting in contemporary Italy. It seeks to restart a reflection on Italian art by returning to the universal matrix of the painting, while forging new synergies between traditional media and electronic/digital evolutions. The goal is to empower formal processes with greater ideational support, advancing projects and, where needed, incorporating technical input for aesthetic development.
A genealogical thread runs within the surface of the painting, tracing icons from the Trecento to the present day. Painting is described as the seed that bore the finest fruits of the picture, a genetic code held by local tradition and resonating in historic palazzi, countless churches, archaeological sites, storerooms, and warehouses. Marziani emphasizes that the pathways of Italian painting escape provincialism and embody a dense, rooted value—a constant link between techne, iconography, and foresight. Restarting from contemporary Italian painting underlines the substantive weight of Italian thought; this project is not merely a market-driven iteration of Made in Italy, but a framework where thinking precedes linguistic action. The idea is to think Italian and to paint Italian, a stance that has fueled important movements and movements across time, from Futurism, Metaphysics, and Magical Realism to later postmodern tendencies such as Transavanguardia, Pittura Colta, and Medialismo.
The Elena and Claudio Cerasi Collection is presented as a pinnacle of Italian systematic, thoughtful, qualitative collecting. Experiencing it means traversing early 20th-century Italian painting with particular attention to artists who animated Rome and its human theater. Palazzo Merulana has become its physical embodiment, a built core where painting organs are arranged as components of a grand artistic journey—the journey of a school of painting called Italy.
Scuola Italiana also nods to the phonetic and critical climate of the Roman School, opening a specific observational field. The keystone call for the project demands an equilibrium between genius loci and an open-source world, where new, striking characters intensify the transmission of shareable values.
A careful selection will unfold through projects built along routes among the works on view. The participating artists come with a documented institutional career and represent a generation that matured in the 1990s. Each will pursue a thematic line to foster dialogues of affinity, belonging, and iconographic debt (perhaps credit) as the guiding threads. The result will be narrative paintings that traverse the two levels of the Elena and Cerasi Collection, inviting the public to a visual stereo experience that nourishes a generous memory.
The opening stage features the Palermo-born painter Nicola Pucci. The project’s rationale—identifying the unique energy of culturally dense zones (cities, districts, neighborhoods, buildings, anywhere a shared tension can be recreated)—finds a consonant with Pucci’s practice. In Palermo, a city that has nurtured many artists of the represented generation, Pucci’s visions transform the real into a singular magical realism, balancing irony, expressivity, apparent lightness, and a soft tragic sense.
Pucci’s work is characterized by a genetic fluency in everyday detail: streets, skies, noble mansions, sea views, public spaces, tram cars, stairs, living rooms, booths, beaches, or indoor pool edges. These heterogeneous spaces do not reveal a single origin, allowing the city of origin to mingle with scattered sites that shape Pucci’s imagination. From this, the transformation of generative reality begins, distilling metaphysical suspensions into a New Magical Realism—a fusion where reality and magic become interpretive keys and a gateway to innumerable destinies. Pucci’s scenes are plausible yet suffused with astonishment, capturing the moment when everything aligns for a brief flash of reality. His paintings brush against the flesh of reality, stepping to the edge of the true, challenging physics and, above all, optical perception conventions.
On this boundary, Pucci’s figurative universe emerges: a synthesis of the inheritance from Antonio Donghi and Felice Casorati renewed through a broader, more layered ecosystem, connected to a digital landscape that brings the impossible closer. Nicola Pucci was born in Palermo in 1966. He moved to Rome in his twenties, where he attended a four-year illustration program at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED). He later spent a brief period in Vipiteno, designing covers for the famous Pigna notebooks. Returning to Rome, Pucci devoted himself full-time to painting, working closely with Bruno Caruso, who supported him and wrote a text for Pucci’s first show in Palermo in 1994. Since 1995, Pucci’s work has been shown in Italy, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and South Korea. Notable solo exhibitions include Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive (Spoleto), Museo Carlo Bilotti (Aranciera di Villa Borghese, Rome), Fondazione Mudima (Milan), and Palazzo Riso (Palermo). Pucci’s paintings are part of major permanent collections, including Museo Carlo Bilotti (Rome), Collezione Fendi, Collezione Larry Gagosian, MAC (Gibellina), Fondazione Sgarbi Cavallini Ferrara, and Collezione Rocco Forte (Palermo). Pucci’s work is framed by a transatlantic dialogue between tradition and contemporary perception, and it anchors the project’s aim of connecting geographic and cultural nodes through a shared visual language.
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