Twombly in the Land of Michelangelo

YOU wouldn’t know it from wandering around the crowded art fair in Bologna a few weeks ago, or from seeing Larry Gagosian’s new gallery in Rome, where   some of the moneyed, antiseptic air of the Chelsea of New York reaches the neighborhood around the Spanish Steps. But Italy has become the basket case of Western Europe.

So everybody says. It is still tourist heaven, of course, if you’re not paying in dollars. In political terms, though, it’s forever chasing its own tail. This winter the government, chronically geriatric, fell for the umpteenth time. Decades of festering indecision caused rotting garbage to pile up in the streets of Naples.

But then there’s the contemporary art scene.

A new museum is under construction in Rome, nicknamed Maxxi, designed by Zaha Hadid. A museum opened not long ago in Bologna called Mambo. (Italians love their acronyms.) The Prada Foundation has just bought an exhibition space in the south of Milan; Rem Koolhaas will be that architect. And in the north of Milan there’s Hangar Bicocca, a vast former Pirelli factory devoted to gigantic installations; Anselm Kiefer’s, an awesome series of towers built of tottering concrete blocks, has justly become a pilgrimage site.

In Naples, Madre, a contemporary museum, does first-rate shows. Now it has a new place. So does the Maramotti family, which owns Max Mara, a clothing company. This winter the Maramotti children opened a foundation in a converted factory on an improbable stretch of loveless industrial and office buildings in Reggio Emilia to house the collection of their late father.

More is happening in Turin, where the Castello di Rivoli has long reigned as the premier museum of contemporary art in Italy. And after years of dawdling, Venice has recently turned its customs house over to François Pinault, the French billionaire who already has the Palazzo Grassi and says he will use them both to show off his collection. That’s hardly the best way for any city to take up new art, but it says something about Italy that Pinault chose Venice over Paris, which wanted him.

To get perspective, I dropped in on Lorcan O’Neill, a dealer who moved from London to Rome several years ago and now runs one of the best high-end galleries in town. He’s a lanky Irishman with a roster of big-name artists and a modest space on a side street in Trastevere. We sat in the back room, surrounded by stacks of the many art magazines published here.

“Foreigners feel free to make fun of Italy and complain that it’s creaky and corrupt,” he said. “For whatever reason, they think it’s charming to insult Italians, never mind that then they go off and buy Prada, eat Italian food and covet Ferraris.” In terms of new art, he added, Italy is in some ways livelier than England, where outside London it’s pretty much a wasteland.

So the art scene here is booming, I said.