Galleria de Arte Moderna

 

Buon giorno,

The promised rain has not yet arrived. It's now expected later tonight, but I hope we get a drop or two earlier.

Figuring on rain, I arranged an indoor activity. First I had to get some cash. Then I had to check out the local bakery.  I figured my target would be easy to find. I'd been in the area before, so off I went very confidently.  Everything went swimmingly. I hit every marker until I was supposed to take a "path." THERE WAS NO PATH!  And I looked. Around and around I went.

I felt less like an idiot when I ran into a fellow museum seeker in the same boat. She'd been wandering for the better part of an hour and was about to give up. I went into the fancy palace hotel and asked for directions. The nice young man at the front desk told me where to go. "It's just around the corner." Yeah. Well, I'd been up and down that street, but I tried again, and then the realization came. "The Path" was the alley behind the locked gate.  That way was closed to me, but surely one could get to the museum from the other side, and so it proved.

The Galleria de Arte Moderna is housed in a former convent, so the building is fun to walk around. I got a reduction in admission for being old, and I enjoyed my visit.  It's quite an extensive collection of Sicilian artists, who were highly skilled and very much in tune with the trends of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. So I would describe the works as very derivative. You can see Sicilian versions of  Realism, Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism, and they are not at all bad works, but they aren't striking either.

I liked the portraits best. The artists were able vividly to capture the personality of the sitters. I also enjoyed a lot of the landscapes.

I'm branching out a bit this evening having a rose from Abruzzo, the instep of the boot, rather than wine from Sicily to go with my pasta. Very tasty it is, too.

Ciao for now