A Lancia power plant
The 1936 thermal plant that once powered the car works was converted rather than disguised, so the hall you walk into is still industrial: concrete, height and overhead light.
Elena moz — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Barbaragerosa — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Barbaragerosa — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Barbaragerosa — CC BY-SA 4.0
No. Two days in Turin belong to the Museo Egizio, the Mole and the royal squares, all central and all on separate tickets. Fondazione Merz sits half an hour away from that and usually holds one exhibition you will finish in an hour. Save it for a third visit to the city, unless postwar Italian art is the reason you travel.
Not necessarily. This is not a permanent display of Mario Merz's work but a programme of temporary shows that draws on his archive sometimes rather than always. Check the site before you go, and if his own pieces are the point of the trip, ask at the desk what is on view that day.
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This place was never meant to be a museum. It was the thermal power plant that fed the Lancia car works, built in 1936 in the working-class district of Borgo San Paolo, and it stood out of use for years until the family of Mario Merz opened it in 2005 as a home for contemporary art. Very little of the industry was scrubbed off: a vast main hall, a high roof, bare concrete, light falling from above, with further exhibition space on the levels around it and a library reading room looking down into the void. The building is half the visit; the art is the other half. Mario Merz (1925-2003) was a central figure in Arte Povera, the Italian movement that wagered that humble materials — glass, clay, bundled branches, neon tubing — were enough to make major work. His best-known pieces are igloos: domes raised on a metal frame in glass, clay or bundled twigs, often with the Fibonacci sequence running across them in neon, an image that came to stand for the whole movement. The foundation keeps his archive and draws on it between shows, but it is not a permanent display of his work. The programme runs on temporary exhibitions and new commissions, plus the Mario Merz Prize, awarded every two years in art and in musical composition. Which means what you see depends entirely on when you come, and the sensible move is to open the foundation's website before crossing the city for it. The shows are serious in tone, often political, meant to be read slowly rather than swallowed in ten minutes. A single exhibition makes for a short visit — an hour usually covers it — but a calm one: no queue, no crush, nobody at your shoulder the way they are in the Museo Egizio. Borgo San Paolo is an ordinary residential district southwest of the centre, roughly half an hour on foot from Porta Nuova or a few minutes on tram 15 (buses 55, 56 and 64 also stop nearby), and the streets around it, along with the nearby Corso Racconigi market, carry the usual run of small restaurants and groceries. Admission is EUR 10, EUR 6 reduced, free on Thursday evenings between 5 and 7, and free with the Torino+Piemonte Card. Plainly: if you have two days in Turin, give them to the Museo Egizio, the Mole and Piazza San Carlo, and leave Fondazione Merz to a longer stay, or to a traveller who already knows postwar Italian art and wants to stand at its source.
The 1936 thermal plant that once powered the car works was converted rather than disguised, so the hall you walk into is still industrial: concrete, height and overhead light.
Merz raised domes on metal frames in glass, clay and bundled twigs, often writing the Fibonacci sequence across them in neon, an image that came to stand for Arte Povera as a whole.
The foundation runs on temporary exhibitions, new commissions and the biennial Mario Merz Prize, so check what is on before you make the trip.
Via Limone 24, Borgo San Paolo, Turin