Travelling exhibition – Pisa

Il Novecento di Catarsini: dalla macchia alla macchina
Fortilizio della Cittadella, Pisa
From 5 to 26 September 2025

Catarsini and Pisa

For the first time a retrospective of Alfredo Catarsini is held in the city his ancestors on his father’s side came from. The artist had shown some works in Pisa in the 1950s and 1960s and had contacts, ties and friendships with the painters of the great tradition of the north-western coast of Tuscany who were his contemporaries. But he formed a very particular cultural bond with the city: in 1958 some of his drawings entered the Catalogue of the Collections of the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of the Institute of Art History in Pisa, a public collection of contemporary graphic art made up of more than 8,000 works on paper. It was the Lucca art historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti who fostered its growth and quality, with an invitation issued in that same year, 1958, to Italian and foreign artists to contribute to the Collection, which today forms a fundamental part of the Museo della Grafica in Pisa.

The travelling exhibition is hosted..

After careful restoration, the Fortilizio is today a very beautiful and unusual exhibition venue that develops upwards through three rooms, from whose windows one enjoys splendid views over the Lungarni, the leaning tower and the city.

On display are 53 works from the Catarsini Foundation collection, together with an Experiential Workshop for tactile and auditory sessions. Worth noting: the labels of the works carry QR codes with adapted, audio-recorded descriptions in two languages, and the entrance banner carries two QR codes with an explanation of the exhibition and with the exhibition route described in detail for people with visual impairments.

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