Museo della Grafica – Palazzo Lanfranchi

About this place

From the upper windows of Palazzo Lanfranchi the Arno runs between two banks of coloured facades, and it is probably the finest view of the river you can have in Pisa while standing indoors and in the shade. The joke is that the museum occupying the palace is not a museum of views at all. It is a museum of paper: prints, drawings and engravings, hung in quiet rooms that almost nobody walks into. The collection began as the University of Pisa's cabinet of drawings and prints, founded in 1957 on the initiative of the critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. A year later he put out a public appeal asking artists to donate work, and they did, and the gifts kept arriving for decades until the holdings ran to thousands of sheets. Among the names you will meet are Picasso, Bruno Munari, Emilio Vedova, the Pomodoro brothers and Giuseppe Capogrossi. Anchoring it all is the Timpanaro donation, the first to arrive, over a thousand pieces from the 19th and 20th centuries, and the Argan gift of some six hundred works from the later 20th century. Let us be straight about the scale. This is a small museum, and what hangs on the walls is usually a temporary exhibition that changes several times a year rather than the permanent collection on full display, which is rotated to protect the paper. Forty minutes covers it; an unhurried visitor might spend an hour and a quarter. If works on paper genuinely interest you — etching, lithography, the preparatory drawing — this is one of the calmest and most rewarding hours in Pisa. If they do not, skip it without guilt. Your priority in this city is the Field of Miracles, and Palazzo Blu, a few minutes along the same bank, puts on bigger shows aimed at a wider audience. Practically: the palace sits on the south bank, about a twenty-minute walk from the Leaning Tower and a short stroll from Palazzo Blu, with riverside cafes close by. Admission is only four euro, and free on the first Sunday of every month. The galleries are on the upper floors of a building whose core goes back to medieval tower houses, but it has been fully adapted — a reserved step-free entrance, ramps and a lift — and you ring the ticket desk if you need that door opened. Sheets not currently on show can be consulted by appointment. One useful correction while you are here: the Pisan palace where Lord Byron stayed is a different Lanfranchi, across the river on Lungarno Mediceo and now the State Archive — not this one.