The new museum near Castel Sant'Angelo will celebrate one of the leading Italian artists of the 20th century, whose links to Fascism have long made him a divisive figure.Rome will open a museum devoted to the painter Mario Sironi in the first half of 2027, the culture ministry announced this week.  The Museo Mario Sironi – Centro Studi Sironiani was presented at the ministry’s headquarters in the Collegio Romano by culture minister Alessandro Giuli, who called it the achievement of his term of office that he is “most proud of”. The museum will be in the Casa Madre dei Mutilati e Invalidi di Guerra (House of the War Disabled) in Piazza Adriana, between Castel Sant’Angelo and the Palazzo di Giustizia. The building was designed by Marcello Piacentini and built between 1928 and 1936. Its Sacrario, or shrine, already contains two large frescoes painted by Sironi in 1938, which will form part of the visit.   The permanent collection will start with 30 works bought by the state from the Archivio Mario Sironi in Rome. A further 90 will come on free loan from the same archive, bringing the opening display to about 120 pieces. Paintings, drawings, sketches and preparatory studies will span the artist’s career from the 1910s to the late 1950s, including the cartoons for his monumental works of the 1930s.Alongside the museum, a study centre will house a specialist library and the archive, which is being digitised so that scholars can consult it. The Pantheon and Castel Sant’Angelo museum authority will run the museum, with a scientific committee that includes Margherita Guccione of the MAXXI museum. Work to restore and fit out the premises is still under way, and the ministry has not given a precise opening date.   Who was Mario Sironi? Sironi was born in Sassari, Sardinia, in 1885 and died in Milan in 1961. He grew up in Rome, where he briefly studied engineering before turning to art and meeting the future Futurists Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. He joined the Futurist movement in 1913 and served at the front in the first world war with several of its leading figures. His best-known early works are the urban landscapes he painted between 1919 and 1921, which turned the metaphysical city squares of Giorgio de Chirico into scenes of Milan’s industrial outskirts. In 1922 he was a founder of the Novecento group, of which he became a leading exponent.Sironi’s career was closely tied to Mussolini’s regime. He was chief political cartoonist and illustrator for the Fascist leader’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, from 1927 to 1933, and later for its illustrated weekly. He also became the leading theorist and practitioner of mural painting, receiving major public commissions, and wrote the Manifesto of Mural Painting in 1933.   According to Artribune, his frescoes at the Casa Madre were censored just after the war and only rediscovered in 1988. After 1945 he returned to easel painting in a style close to abstract Art Informel. He was elected to Rome’s Accademia di San Luca in 1956.Giuli said the reappraisal of Sironi’s work was “an act of maturity” that invites people “to look at history without prejudice”. He described Sironi as an artist who crossed the contradictions of the 20th century.Sironi’s granddaughter Romana Sironi, who heads the archive, said the museum crowns more than 30 years of work. The museum is also meant to anchor a wider trail of public sites with Sironi’s work, from a large fresco at Rome’s La Sapienza University to Milan’s Palazzo dei Giornali.   Photo Ministero della Cultura