The Burri ‘Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco’ museum is located here in Città di Castello, less than 2 kilometers far from our Agriturismo San Giovanni; it owns the largest collection of artworks by Alberto Burri (1915-1995), the italian artist who became renowned for demolishing ad reconfiguring the occidental artistic tradition.

Until last January, at Guggenheim Museum in New York, it took place a magnificent retrospective called ‘The Trauma of Painting’: it was the artist’s birth centenary celebration and Ms Emily Brown, the exibithion curator, wisely recreated Burri’s pioneer work atmosphere in the Guggenheim’s spaces.

Now that the pieces are back in Umbria, Città di Castello, it’s definitely worth exploring its beauty and complexity in the nearby museum, a place where surreal atmospheres and silent suggestion meet, strongly desired by the artist himself, the maximum example of contemporary art in Umbria.

The ‘Ex Seccatoi del Tabacco’, masterpiece of 1950 industrial building recycling, opened in 1990 as part of the Palazzo Albizzini Burri collection. In the huge exibithion halls, completely painted in black as Burri planned, starts a 128 paintings cycles path: Il Viaggio (1979), Orsanmichele (1980), Sestante (1982), Rosso e Nero (1983-1984), T Cellotex (1975-1984), Annottarsi (1985-1987), Non ama il Nero (1988), Grandi Neri (1988-1990), Metamorfotex(1991) e Il Nero e l’Oro (1992-1993).

Three majestic sculptures in red and black coated iron are placed in the outside: Grande Ferro Sestante (1982),Grande Ferro K (1982) e Grande Ferro U (1990).

The remaining Burri collection, about 130 paintings, is located in the Città di Castello historic centre at Palazzo Albizzini, only 5 minutes far from here: the sublimation of materialism, abstract and informal art enclosed into a Renaissance frame. Inside Palazzo Albizzini, moreover, we find a library specialized in modern and contemporary art, Alberto Burri’s phototheque and the archive, containing a vast bibliographic material about the artist.

The artistic production of Alberto Burri – legitimately called ‘the poet of material’ - brings us all the struggle of his past existence. The use of unconventional material (tar, mold, burlap, plastic...) the drying and the combustion techniques adopted as a metaphor for devitalization to bring objects at the level of metaphisic, derange from contingent reality and at the same time witness the lability of time.