Italy Arts Guide: Spring-Summer 2007

Whatever your reason for visiting Italy, chances are good you’ll take in at least one museum or art gallery while you’re there. With so many world famous works of art and architecture to see, it would be hard to avoid them. And yet you might also want to consider checking out at least one temporary or lesser-known exhibit as well. You can get an idea of some of the special exhibits which are on display throughout Italy with this Arts Guide. And here a couple more things you can see if you’re going to Italy this year:

• The city of Milan, capital of the Italian fashion world, will host fashionistas of another kind until mid-June. The CowParade, which has hit cities all over the world, will have life-sized cow-shaped art pieces all over the city through June 17.
• The Museum of Roman History, until recently in a Roman suburb no one visits, is set to move to Capitol Hill on the edge of the Circus Maximus. It will include the museum’s amazing collection of artefacts as well as never-before-seen pieces which have been kept in storage for lack of exhibit space. Rome’s mayor is calling it a “new Louvre,” and the first part of the new museum will open in October.

On another note, if you’re heading to Florence to see Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise” which were commissioned for the doors of the baptistry, you won’t find all of them. Three panels will be on tour in the United States from late April through mid-January 2008 – they’ll spend time in Atlanta’s High Museum of Art (April 28-July 15), Chicago’s Art Institute (July 28-October 13) and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 30-January 13). When the panels are done with their American tour, officials say they’ll never leave Italy again.