Poldi Pezzoli Reimagines the Grand Tour with Masterpieces from the MET

The Museo Poldi Pezzoli opens an imaginary passage through centuries of travel, dreams, and discovery with Wonders of the Grand Tour, an exhibition that reinterprets the era when Europe’s cultured elites crossed Italy in search of beauty. At its center shines an exceptional loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Giovanni Paolo Panini’s Ancient Rome, a monumental 1757 fantasy gallery in which more than fifty views of the Eternal City gather like actors on an ideal stage. Ruins, statues, and architecture converse among themselves while historical figures - including the artist - move through the scene as pilgrims of art.
From this starting point unfolds an immersive path that invites visitors to “step into” the painting and rediscover, in the museum’s rooms, the works that shaped the imagination of eighteenth-century travelers. The journey is accompanied by the recently acquired Interior of the Pantheon (1743) and by two new Roman views by Gaspar van Wittel, long considered among the most coveted painted souvenirs of Europe’s aristocratic voyagers. The tour continues with a third-century Roman sarcophagus and a 1749 Laocoön recreated in hard-paste porcelain by the Ginori manufactory - an emblem of an antiquity that continued to dictate artistic ideals. The exhibition culminates with a collection of Grand Tour fans: precious, portable objects that offered traveling ladies a visual compendium of ruins, temples, and rediscovered cities. Wonders of the Grand Tour becomes, ultimately, a contemporary portrait of an age that shaped our way of looking at art, transformed here into a sensory and narrative experience.