Gipsoteca Giulio Monteverde

The Plaster-cast gallery is open to visitors every Saturday, Sunday and public holiday from May to October from 10.30-12.30 and 15-18. Booking is required for other days and times of the year. Giulio Monteverde was born in Bistagno in 1837. He studied in Genoa and then in Rome, at the Accademia di San Luca, where he achieved considerable technical progress and in the early 1870s achieved his first great success with works that showed a confident positive approach to the theme of the human genius and technical and scientific progress. In 1884, he set up his home and workshop in a building on piazza Indipendenza in Rome, which he had purposely built: his intense career, studded with a large amount of international commissions, above all connected with burial and commemorative monuments, made him become one of the protagonists of the official art of his time, involved in commissions and juries and awarded honorary positions. In the last five years of his life, Monteverde affectionately approached his native land of Acqui, with a series of sculptural “gifts”. In 1919, two years after his death, his daughters donated the collection of models in plaster that had accumulated in the Roman studio to Genoa: a good part of these works, following various donations and gratuitous loans to Bistagno is now in the “Giulio Monteverde” Plaster-cast gallery of Bistagno.