Torino Artscape is Artissima’s column highlighting current exhibitions in the city’s leading contemporary art institutions: a regular feature offering a glimpse into the most compelling exhibition programs, curatorial visions, and artistic expressions that animate Turin’s contemporary art scene. Torino Artscape invites you to explore Turin as an essential destination for art lovers, offering inspiration and cultural enrichment throughout the year.
This new episode is dedicated to Casa Museo Carol Rama.
Casa Museo Carol Rama
By appointment only
On the top floor of an Art Nouveau building at Via Napione 15, light filters in at an angle through the attic windows. The dark walls hold onto shadows even during the day. Every surface is inhabited: accumulated objects, gifts, photographs, fragments — a slow and deliberately non-organic sedimentation that Carol Rama built up over decades, transforming what should have been a sober bourgeois apartment into something radically different. A space that is, in every sense, a work of art in itself.
The building, designed by engineer Ponzano in the early decades of the twentieth century, was conceived as an apartment reflecting the typical bourgeois taste of the time. Carol Rama’s life, however, would be anything but typical. In 1942, she was marked by the premature death of her father — likely by suicide — to whom she was deeply attached. Between 1942 and 1943, due to the heavy bombing of Turin, Carol was evacuated and subsequently decided to move into the apartment at Via Napione 15.
Born on 17 April 1918 into a lower-middle-class family in Turin, Carol encountered art almost by chance. In the studio of painter Gemma Vercelli on Via Digione — the same street where her father ran his coachbuilding workshop — she posed as a teenage model and observed. “I started painting when I was fourteen and have never stopped. […] Each of us must realise something otherwise we feel extinguished, at least that’s what I believe. […] Each of us has a tropical disease within, which we try to remedy. I remedy with painting.” Via Napione became the stage for this ongoing attempt: a place of work, thought, and life that gradually evolved into a living archive.
In this house, objects do not decorate; they bear witness. Every gift she received — from Andy Warhol, Man Ray, Carlo Mollino, Massimo Mila, and Edoardo Sanguineti — was absorbed into the space as an organic element, part of a network of relationships that the artist never ceased to cultivate and weave together. Lea Vergine, Luciano Anselmino, and Giancarlo Salzano are among the many figures who passed through these rooms, evoking a web of intellect and affection spanning decades of Italian and international art, and confirming Carol Rama’s central role within that context, though recognition often came late.
Casa Carol Rama is the artist’s final great work — perhaps her most intimate and most complex. It is neither a museum nor an archive, but a place that remains alive, where the distance between art and biography disappears entirely. Every object is a threshold to a story; every story leads back to the work. Carol Rama passed away on 24 September 2015, leaving this home as an open testament — a place where visitors can continue to discover the depth and complexity of one of the most original voices in twentieth-century art.
