GAM — Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art

Turin's civic gallery traces its roots to an exhibition society founded in 1863, making it one of Italy's oldest public collections devoted to modern art — decades before most Italian cities had any dedicated space for contemporary work at all. The collection moved several times over the following century before settling in 1959 into its current rationalist building on Via Magenta, purpose-built for modern art at a time when most museums still treated it as an afterthought squeezed into converted palazzi.

That early, deliberate commitment to modern and contemporary work has shaped the collection ever since: rather than freezing at some fixed historical point, GAM has kept acquiring right up to the present, giving it one of the more genuinely continuous, unbroken collections of Italian art from the 19th century through to today anywhere in the country.

The permanent collection runs chronologically from 19th-century Piedmontese landscape painting and the Divisionists through Futurism and on to Arte Povera — a radical, materials-driven movement that took shape largely in Turin itself during the late 1960s, making this as much a homegrown chapter of art history as an imported one for the museum to display. Later galleries bring the story up to contemporary photography, video, and installation work.

Alongside Italian artists, the collection includes international names such as Chagall, Modigliani, and Warhol, and the museum maintains a dedicated research library and a photography and video archive — a working scholarly resource, not just a set of galleries, that underlines GAM's role as an active centre for contemporary art study rather than a static display of finished history.

GAM is closed on Mondays, and tends to be noticeably quieter than Turin's headline attraction, the Egyptian Museum, despite holding a collection of comparable seriousness — a good option if you'd rather see world-class art without the queues. Via Magenta sits a short walk from the city centre, easy to combine with a wider afternoon of gallery-hopping.

Because the collection runs right up to the contemporary moment, it's worth checking what temporary exhibitions are on before you visit, since these often rotate through the museum's later galleries alongside the permanent chronological display.