The collection of artworks owned by the journalist and entrepreneur Eugenio Balzan, originally from Badia Polesine, has been hosted since 2014 in the small hall of the Teatro Sociale dedicated to him.
It consists in a collection of 19th and 20th-century Italian paintings, made up of 49 works by 26 Italian painters and includes some absolute peaks of painting from that era, such as the works of Domenico Morelli, including the masterpiece The Pompeian Bath, or the canvases of Mosè Bianchi and the paintings of Filippo Palizzi, including the extraordinary Girl on the Rock at Sorrento, and is characterized by examples of excellence for each of the artists that Balzan chose to collect.
Among them we remember the Piemontese Alberto Pasini, the Lombards Leonardo Bazzaro, Eugenio Gignous, and Gaetano Previati, the Venetians Giacomo Favretto, Luigi Nono, and Ettore Tito, the Toscan Giovanni Fattori and Plinio Nomellini, the Neapolitans Edoardo Dalbono, Giuseppe De Nittis, Francesco Paolo Michetti, Federico Rossano, and Gioacchino Toma, in a perfectly successful effort to represent each regional “School,” as the Italian artistic narrative of the 19th century was then understood, up to an incursion into the 20th century with a work by Ardengo Soffici.
