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To see: Giacomo Balla’s house opens to visitors in Rome, here’s how to book

Living in a work of art. For Giacomo Balla it was just like that, and from 25 June it will be possible to check it in person: it opens to the public – for the first time, but only for a few months – the apartment in via Oslavia in Rome in which the painter and theorist of futurism he lived for almost thirty years, from 1929 until his death in 1958. Here, in the middle of the elegant Delle Vittorie district, Balla (indeed, «Futurballa», as he loved to sign himself in some of his paintings and as you can also read on the entrance door) has created a world in his image and likeness, where shapes and colors cover every available space, in a very modern blend of art and life, objects of common use (even the clothes of the Balla family had been designed to match the rest) and paintings hung on the walls.

After all, Balla himself wrote in 1916, together with Depero, the Futurist reconstruction of the Universe, which proposes to “carry out this total fusion in order to reconstruct the universe by making it happy, that is, by recreating it in its entirety”.

Balla’s apartment, which was the home of the artist’s two daughters, Elica and Luce, until the 1990s, has been protected by a protection obligation since 2004 and, since 2018, restoration and safety measures have been carried out. leading today to the opening, coinciding with the anniversary celebrating the 150th anniversary of the painter’s birth. The house can be visited in conjunction with the MAXXI exhibition: here, in gallery 5, tapestries, drawings, sketches and furnishings arrived directly from via Oslavia (and for the first time on display to the public, such as the door of the red study or the designs for Luce’s clothes) works by international contemporary artists, from Carlo Benvenuto to Jim Lambie, Emiliano Maggi and Leonardo Sonnolo, Cassina with Patricia Urquiola. The exhibition can be visited, until November 21, from Tuesday to Sunday from 11 to 19, while the house of Balla opens only on weekends starting next June 25th.

Reservations, mandatory, can be made from the museum website: here you can also download the self-certification to be presented at the entrance. Long awaited, the opening of the house in via Oslavia is one of those events not to be missed: Futurballa is more current than ever.

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