The Inspire Conversations: Arturo Galansino on Reimagining Florence and the Future of Palazzo Strozzi
- Andrew C.
- Nov 25
- 10 min read
Inside Palazzo Strozzi’s Renaissance Revival
In the great story of Florence, it would be easy for Palazzo Strozzi to remain a beautifully frozen monument: a perfect Renaissance palazzo, once home to one of the city’s most powerful families, framed by iron lanterns and pietra serena stone. Instead, over the last decade, it has become something far more dynamic, a laboratory where the language of our time is tested against six centuries of history.
At the center of this quiet revolution is Dr. Arturo Galansino, General Director of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. Formerly of the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, and the Royal Academy, he arrived in Florence ten years ago with what many considered an impossible mission: to make a city synonymous with the Renaissance a global stage for contemporary and modern art.
In this inaugural feature of The Inspire Conversations, we sat down with Dr. Arturo Galansino, General Director of Palazzo Strozzi, to explore the layered intersections of contemporary art, cultural storytelling, and Florence as both backdrop and protagonist. From reimagining the palazzo as a living forum to his personal connection with the Renaissance city, Galansino offers an insider's portrait of Florence not only as a living city, but a cultural state of mind.
From Paris and London to Florence:
Answering an Unexpected Call
When Galansino first received the headhunter’s call about Palazzo Strozzi, he did not imagine it would change his life.
“I was very happy in Paris and London,” he recalls. “I thought my entire career would stay outside Italy. Museums abroad felt more advanced; there were more opportunities for large projects.”
Florence, at that moment, did not yet present itself as a city of contemporary experimentation. Internationally, it was loved, almost exclusively, for its past.
“Florence was renowned for heritage and art history, but not as a place of innovation,” he says. “There was a huge gap between its reputation and its potential. I saw that immediately when I came for the interview. The city was missing a cultural program that spoke the language of our times.”
What convinced him was not only the building, but its promise. The palazzo, designed according to the golden ratio by Giuliano da Sangallo, felt to him like “a perfect showcase for human intelligence and creativity: grand, but still on a human scale.”
That human scale was the starting point for a new chapter. It suggested a palace that could become more than a container for masterpieces: a place where past and present could be put into active conversation, without one swallowing the other.
Re-authoring a Renaissance City
Taking on the directorship of Palazzo Strozzi meant more than programming a series of shows; it meant proposing a new role for Florence itself.
“People used to say contemporary art cannot work in Florence because we have the Renaissance,” Galansino smiles. “We decided to believe exactly the opposite. Contemporary art can work because we have the Renaissance. Our heritage is not a burden, it’s a pair of wings.”
From the outset, his strategy was clear: offer cultivated national and international visitors a real reason to return to Florence, outside the gravitational pull of mass tourism. The “excuse” would be ambitious, concept-driven exhibitions, often of contemporary and modern artists underrepresented in Italy, shown in dialogue with the city’s history.
“In Florence, our heritage is not a burden.
It’s a pair of wings.”
The response was immediate. Palazzo Strozzi broke attendance records for contemporary art in Italy. More importantly, it built a community: roughly half Italian but largely non-Tuscan, a quarter local, and 20–25% foreign, depending on the year. Around half of visitors are under 30, a striking statistic for a Renaissance city often perceived as “classical” rather than contemporary.
“These are not people passing through on a tour bus,” he explains. “They know why they are here. They don’t want the tourist traps. They want to rediscover Florence through culture.” This also meant defining what kind of institution Palazzo Strozzi wanted to be.
A Renaissance Palace as a Stage for the Present
Under Galansino’s tenure, Palazzo Strozzi has hosted figures such as Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Marina Abramović, Olafur Eliasson, and now KAWS. For most museums, these are major names. For a Renaissance palazzo with no permanent collection and limited storage, they are also acts of logistical daring.
“We are purely an exhibition space,” he notes. “Every show is a new project from zero: new loans, new partners, new negotiations, and new risks.” Surprisingly, the foundation does not own a collection; it is, by design, an exhibition engine. The “permanent collection,” in a way, is intellectual—projects, collaborations, and ideas.
But the building itself does part of the work. With its three street-facing portals and the iconic courtyard that feels both intimate and public, the palazzo becomes a kind of piazza, a stage where artists are invited to challenge themselves against history.
“Artists love to be challenged,” he says. “If you are a great artist, your goal is to enter art history. And art history, in many ways, was invented here.”
He is referring to Giorgio Vasari, the Florentine architect of the Uffizi and the Vasari Corridor, whose Lives of the Artists in the 16th century was the first systematic history of art. “When contemporary artists come to Florence, they are entering that tradition,” Galansino adds. “They feel the weight and opportunity of it.”
This is why Palazzo Strozzi frequently commissions site-specific works that respond to the architecture and the city, even though it cannot yet build a permanent collection to keep them.
“Artists like to be challenged. Artists like to be put inside history. Because when you are a great artist, your goal is to be part of art history.”
“Imagine our storage if we had everything,” he laughs. “It would be like Disneyland, slides by Carsten Höller, monumental sculptures, huge canvases. One day I would love to create a kind of Strozzi park in the Tuscan countryside for all these works. For now, the pieces return to the artists after the show. The idea remains here.”
Among the shows that linger in his memory, he cites Olafur Eliasson’s Nel tuo tempo exhibition, where light and shadow turned the palazzo itself into a medium. “With very little, he made the architecture breathe,” Galansino recalls. “He gave life to the windows, to the shadows, to the time we spend in the space. It was all about experience.”
The Power of an Idea
For Galansino, the real collection is not made of objects, but of ideas.
“A strong concept is our driving force,” he says. “It is what convinces lenders, sponsors, and audiences.”
Large historical exhibitions such as the acclaimed shows on Donatello and now Beato Angelico are five-year endeavors, starting from a curatorial question and expanding outward to restorations, loans, and international partnerships. It can mean finding the leading scholar in the field, partnering with museums like the Museo di San Marco, and restoring key works with the support of foundations such as Friends of Florence, before they re-enter the public eye.
Contemporary and modern shows require slightly shorter timelines but equally intense collaboration, often asking artists to create something entirely new for the Palazzo, projects that would be unthinkable without the trust built over time.
“We don’t have a permanent collection. Our collection is made of ideas, concepts strong enough to attract the world.”
The forthcoming Mark Rothko exhibition in March 2026, for example, will place the painter’s spiritual abstraction in dialogue with 15th-century Florentine art, particularly the work of Angelico and Michelangelo.
“Rothko was deeply inspired by Florence,” Galansino explains. “No one has really explored that relationship. We will show how Renaissance spiritual imagery resonates in his work. It’s a way of seeing modernity and the Renaissance as part of one longer conversation.”
Every project begins with a question: Why this artist, in this place, now? The answer, if it is convincing enough, becomes the architecture of the exhibition itself.
Experimentation, Accessibility,
and the Visitor as Protagonist
If the palazzo’s architecture anchors it in the past, its institutional philosophy looks firmly forward. Galansino speaks often about “Returning Experimentation to Florence,” but he is quick to point out that experimentation is not only for artists, it is also about how audiences experience art.
“Contemporary art is not a niche language for insiders,” he insists. “It speaks about us, about migration, human rights, diversity, and inclusion. People should not feel intimidated.”
To that end, Palazzo Strozzi has become a laboratory for visitor-centered programming. Around half of its audience engages through specific activities designed for different communities: schools, universities, families, visitors with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, people on the autism spectrum, and more.
“In many museums, especially when they are crowded, you feel art is far from you,” he says. “At Strozzi everything is built around the visitor. We want people to feel at home in a palace.”
He measures success not only in ticket sales but in testimonies: visitors who discover a contemporary artist for the first time and feel unexpectedly moved; guests who thought Renaissance art was “too difficult” and suddenly find a way in.
“When someone tells us, ‘You opened the door for me,’ that is the best reward,” he says. “We don’t just show works; we try to make art part of people’s lives.”
Palazzo Strozzi, in this sense, functions less like a temple and more like a forum: a safe space where art is not only observed but utilized, used to think, to feel, to test one’s own position in the world.
“Palazzo Strozzi is a safe space for everybody. We want people to feel at home and to feel that the art we exhibit speaks about themselves.”
Beyond Mass Tourism:
A Different Economy for Florence
The impact of this approach extends well beyond the museum walls. Surveys conducted with external consultants reveal that roughly half of Palazzo Strozzi’s visitors travel to Florence specifically for its exhibitions, often staying multiple nights. Many are young, under 30. Their spending patterns differ sharply from mass-tourism flows.
“Our audience goes to great restaurants, stays in quality hotels, buys from local artisans and designers,” Galansino notes. “They create an economy that is healthier for the city.”
Each year, this “Cultivated Tourism” generates an estimated economic impact of over 100 million euros in Florence and its surroundings. Palazzo Strozzi also deliberately disperses visitors across lesser-known sites through curated itineraries linked to each exhibition, sending them to churches, smaller museums, and regional destinations they might otherwise miss.
“We want tourism to be more spread out, more sustainable,” he says. “Florence is much more than the Uffizi, the Duomo, and Michelangelo’s David.”
“Half of our visitors come to Florence only for Palazzo Strozzi. They are not mass tourists; they are cultural travelers reshaping the city’s future.”
He mentions the Museo del Bargello, the Convent of San Marco, the Museo della Specola, and the Stibbert Museum as examples of extraordinary yet under-visited spaces that deserve a place on any serious cultural traveler’s map. Through their "Fuorimostra" tool and itineraries, “exhibitions outside the exhibition”, Palazzo Strozzi quietly rewrites how visitors move through the city, encouraging them to seek out the overlooked and the quietly magnificent.
“Florence is a constellation,” he says. “We try to help people see more of the stars.”
Horses, Parallel Lives,
and the Perfect Day in Florence
For all his institutional responsibilities, Galansino keeps a second life carefully intact: Horses.
“I like to say I divide myself between art and horses,” he admits. On weekends, he returns to Piedmont, where his family runs an equestrian operation, and he competes in show jumping. “Being with horses is my way of recharging. All my stress disappears when I touch my horse. They are my healers.”
It is a parallel universe: disciplines, training schedules, competition circuits, worlds away from opening nights and board meetings, yet connected by the same focus and precision. “When I am with my horses, everything else resets,” he says. “I come back to Florence with a clearer mind.”
In Florence, where his days are claimed by the palazzo, he finds small rituals instead: early walks through the historic center before the crowds arrive, detours into Oltrarno neighborhood to visit artisans’ workshops, and most of all, escapes to the hills and gardens that frame the city.
“In a few minutes, you can be at Boboli Garden or Villa Bardini or walking up to San Miniato al Monte,” he says. “You are still in Florence, but you see the cathedral as if you could touch Brunelleschi’s dome with your hand. You feel how visionary it must have looked 600 years ago. It is still unbelievable today.”
When he does step out as a flâneur rather than a director, his Florence is both refined and quietly local. He loves the Officina Profumo Farmaceutica Santa Maria Novella flagship, a former pharmacy founded by Dominican friars nearly 800 years ago,“ more a museum than a shop,” as he describes it. He finds deep inspiration visiting the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the renowned restoration center where damaged masterpieces are slowly, painstakingly brought back to life.
His table in Florence is set at places that mirror his taste for history with a contemporary edge, from Irene at Hotel Savoy, Caffè dell’Oro at Portrait Firenze, facing the river, The Gucci Osteria, and the ever-iconic Cibrèo Trattoria. they form, in his world, a kind of personal circuit of hospitality, places where the city feels both international and intimately Florentine.
A City as a State of Mind
Asked what he hopes Palazzo Strozzi will mean a hundred years from now, Galansino does not hesitate.
“I hope it will be remembered as the place that brought experimentation back to Florence,” he says. “A place that showed how heritage can be wings, not weight.”
Through its programs, he wants the Palazzo to continue supporting Florence to evolve from a static image of the past to an active participant in the global cultural conversation.
“Florence has always traded in ideas, not just goods,” he reflects. "In the Renaissance, it invented banking and art history. Today, it can invent new ways of seeing the world again. Our role is to make sure the city remains a place of vision.”
For anyone planning a journey to Tuscany, whether for a weekend or a lifetime, Palazzo Strozzi offers that vision in concentrated form: a Renaissance palace where the past and present intersect, and where visitors are invited not only to look, but to think, interact, and belong.
“Florence has always traded in ideas. Today, it can invent new ways of seeing the world again.”
The Inspire Conversations is a new editorial series from THE INSPIRED by My Inspire Project, spotlighting the cultural voices shaping how we experience the world today— one conversation at a time.
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