Caffè Fernanda, Italy

A grand opening, rich of history, in one of the most characteristic districts of Milan. On October 1st, inside the Pinacoteca di Brera, there was the inauguration of the Caffè Fernanda, which pays tribute with its name to the gallery’s visionary director Fernanda Wittgens, the first woman to run a national museum in Italy and thanks to whom the Pinacoteca reopened in 1950, after the terrible bombings of 1943.

The cafeteria and bistrot, whose gastronomic proposal is curated by the chef Filippo Lamantia, is part of the museum itinerary with its new setting consisting of 38 rooms realized by the director James Bradburne. The interior design project, by the Milanese studio rgastudio, is focused on both chromatic and material coherence thanks to the gallery’s new layout, and on a reinterpretation of the 1950s architecture of the location. The intense peacock blue colour chosen for the walls accentuates the great artworks exhibited in the Cafè: Pietro Damini’s St. Bernard Converting the Duke of Aquitania, Bertel Thorvaldsen’s The Three Graces, the bust of Fernanda Wittgens by Marino Marini and her portrait by Attilio Rossi. The wonderful peach-blossom marble floors and the Lepanto red frames, prominent features of Piero Portaluppi’s previous design, have been recovered and restored. Below

Damini’s seventeenth-century painting stands the large, round-edged bar, which recalls the furniture of the fifties in ribbed wood, albeit with inverted proportions, made of large semi-circular strips of canaletto wood and with a thin, antique brass top with rounded ends.