The display space in the Gamud, Udine's Gallery of Modern Art, will offer (March 6-13-20 2010, 3pm) three guided tours to let the visitor discover several female figures who played a central role in Italian culture, as artists, collectors and patrons of art. Unseen works, personal objects and letters will focus on bringing to life the passions of collectors Vittoria Peretti de Prampero, Maria Luisa Astaldi and Bianca Marini Solari.

The painter and noblewoman Vittoria di Prampero (1876-1956), friend and patron of Afro Basaldella, along with her husband, General Remigio Peretti, was a refined collector both of antique art and of the most important Italian paintings from the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth Century.

Her collection, donated in 1957 to the Civic Museum of Udine, includes furniture, paintings and antique furniture, works by the Scapigliatura masters such as Tranquillo Cremona, Daniele Ranzoni and Mosč Bianchģ; the divisionist Achilles Tominetti, a friend of Segantini; Venetian painters Peter Fragiacomo, Emma Ciardi and Alessandro Milesi; Neapolitans such as Francesco Paolo Michetti and even a landscape attributed to Corot which is currently being studied. For this occasion the works are flanked by a portrait of Vittoria painted by Louis Bronte.

Maria Luisa Astaldi (1899-1982), an author and collector, bequeathed her collected works to the Gamud in 1983. The collection, one of the most important in Italy, reflects Astaldi's cultural dedication to and interest in contemporary art, an interest which in 1947 led her to found the international culture magazine Ulisse. The works in the collection include pieces from Severini to Santomaso, through Sironi, Rosai, Morandi, Campigli, Arturo Martini, Scipione, Mafai, Pirandello, Guttuso and more.

Bianca Marini Solari, who recently turned 100, donated her collection of antique art to museums in Udine in 1995. Among the donated items were three paintings by Levi, seven drawings by Zigaina, a landscape by Carrą and an odalisque by Cantatore. The beauty of Bianca, wife of the brilliant watch tycoon Fermo Solari, was immortalized in a portrait by Carlo Levi in 1946, another by Bulgarian Boris Georgev in 1942, as well as in medals and photographs which will be exhibited alongside her collection.

Guided by Sonia Boldarin, it will be a suggestive trail through the 19th and 20th Centuries to see at first hand the tastes and personalities of these three great collectors. It will not only take in the masterpieces they all loved, but also their personal effects and images of themselves, together encompassing three exceptional lives devoted to culture and art.