Guida alla Pinacoteca dell'Università degli Studi di Trieste

The rooms on the first floor of the central building of the University of Trieste, which house the Rector’s Office, host numerous works of art that have joned the University’s collections at very different times and under various circumstances. The most important nucleus comes from the ‘Esposizione Nazionale di Pittura Italiana contemporanea’ (National Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Painting), held in the Aula Magna between December 1953 and March of the following year: a particularly difficult moment in the long post-war period experienced by the city, which would return to Italy only a year later, in October of that same 1954. The exhibition had been commissioned by Rector Rodolfo Ambrosino, Superintendent of Monuments, Galleries and Antiquities Benedetto Civiletti and the first holder of the Chair of Art History Gian Luigi Coletti as a testimony to the city’s cultural link with Italy, as well as being a major event in the artistic history of those years. Those works constitute the most important and visible nucleus, enriched over the years, of the University’s art collections, which are, however, much larger and more structured and in continuous expansion thanks to the strong ties established by the University of Trieste with its territory, which was the main political and cultural aim of the exhibition project set up in 1953. An objective that has therefore been achieved and that allows the University to boast today a collection of works of art that appears exemplary in the panorama of Italian universities collections.