Mediaset – TGCOM24: USA, Magazzino Italian Art: the most important Museum dedicated to Postwar Italian Art outside the Bel Paese

“America has given me so much, and this is my way of saying thank you without forgetting where I come from,” says Giorgio Spanu, co-founder of Magazzino Italian Art with his wife Nancy Olnick.

It may be the Trumpian winter, or perhaps the upcoming retirement of Glenn Lowry who is leaving MoMA after 30 years as its director, but at this moment it’s us, the Italians—the former “broccolini”—who are saving the Big Apple’s art exhibition scene. The Metropolitan, true to its mission, focuses on the ancient with "The rise of painting" in early 14th-century Siena. If you want to explore modernity and contemporary art, however, you’ll need to follow the banks of the Hudson River for little over an hour until you reach Cold Spring, NY, where the most important Museum dedicated to Contemporary Italian art outside of Italy is unexpectedly located.

"America has given me so much and this is my way of saying thank you without forgetting where I come from. Here, everything is Italian, including the fresh ingredients that we grow in the gardens surrounding the museum", says Giorgio Spanu, who, along with his wife Nancy Olnick, co-founded Magazzino Italian Art. Naturally, an Italian chef prepares meals for visitors, completing the experience.

The art world is no stranger to private museums; art publications have long lost count of the number of those who have opened an exhibition space to satisfy their own ego and display their wealth. Sometimes this overlaps with business ventures (Prada, LVMH, Pinault, just to name a few), while other times it's just the desire of showcasing one's own taste. None of this applies here in Cold Spring. Magazzino—so named because it was literally an industrial warehouse—does not contain a family collection. Instead, it is a cultural center created to connect the two worlds of its co-founders, Italy and North America, through art. No market, just lots of knowledge and love. It focuses on what was arguably the last magical moment in Italian art history: Arte Povera. Given that one of the aforementioned Lords of the Arts has recently dedicated a colossal exhibition to the same movement at the Paris former Stock Exchange, knows has La Bourse de Paris, a comparison seems inevitable.

What makes the American presentation of Arte Povera infinitely more successful is, first and foremost, the space itself. Arte povera—how does it relate to a kind of Pantheon, with all its splendor as a temple of wealth? The artists of this movement, identified in the late 1960s by the never sufficiently recognized Germano Celant (a research center dedicated to him operates permanently in Cold Spring), were deeply aware of and engaged with the social movements of that decade. They are undoubtedly more at home in a former factory. Povero certainly does not pair well with the idea of abundance seen under the Parisian dome, but resonates with the understated charm of Magazzino, which presents a tenth of the works—each one, however, an authentic masterpiece. The comparison could go on, but one last example will suffice: Michelangelo Pistoletto, the youthful elder statesman of Italian art, presented colorful QR codes as novelties in Paris. In Cold Spring, visitors are greeted in the lobby of the museum by a foosball table with jerseys bearing the colors of all nations. Beyond the building’s wall, on the edge of the forest, lies the symbol of the Third Paradise, created by Magazzino for Pistoletto to honor his ninetieth birthday. It opens the doors to infinity.

In 2023, a second space was inaugurated next to Magazzino, the Robert Olnick Pavilion, intended for events and temporary exhibitions. Until July 25, 2025, it hosts a retrospective of arguably the greatest Italian woman artist of the 20th century, Maria Lai. Curated by the foundation’s Artistic Director, Paola Mura, the exhibition traces the artist’s entire creative journey, focusing especially on her American stay, which steered her sensitivity toward abstraction. Included are her youthful works and the phase in which material detaches from the canvas in search of a third dimension—the thread that becomes the narrative of an artist in dialogue with Costantino Nivola, the other great Sardinian artist of the 20th century. The culminating phase of her career, however, is probably what we would now call performance art. In 1981, Lai used 26 kilometers of weaved blue cloth to tie together every house in her hometown of Ulassai to the mountain. Legarsi alla montagna was the title. Critics interpreted this gesture of gratitude towards the earth as the birth of a new form of expression: Relational Art. If Cold Spring is not on your route, you can also admire the event on the foundation website, www.magazzino.art

Marco di Gregorio