Music in the palaces, chamber concerts, among works and galleries of inestimable value, to restore the ancient splendor of the Roman palaces. This is the challenge launched by the new director of the Galleria Borghese in Rome Francesca Cappelletti, who recently hosted in her halls the orchestra of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, conducted by maestro Daniele Gatti and the étoile Eleonora Abbagnato on a journey musical and choreographic starting from the baroque of Händel and Vivaldi, passing from Paisiello and Mozart, up to the neoclassicism of Stravinskij, which will be broadcast by Rai channels. “Thanks to these musical projects – Francesca Cappelletti told Adnkronos – we bring back the artistic and cultural climate of an era, between the Renaissance and the Baroque, with commissions not only to great painters and sculptors, but also to illustrious composers. I found the work of art inside the Italian courts and palaces, it was only a pretext for conversation, a social ‘practice’, also suggested in many treatises, which had to keep awake reflection, comparison, dialogue, among the masterpieces of the past, for example, and those of modernity, such as the sculptures of Canova “. The dancing satyrs of marble, Apollo with the lyre, the Giorgionesque shepherds with their instruments, the heroines of Gian Lorenzo Bernini seized by the gods who chasing them, but also Caravaggio’s David and Goliath, with the tragic self-portrait of the great painter, in that screaming head, before being swallowed by the darkness. “There are no barriers between the figurative arts, the performing arts, music – continued Francesca Cappelletti – and of this Gian Lorenzo Bernini, tutelary deity of the Gallery and perhaps also of the initiative, sculptor, painter, architect, set designer, playwright and actor…. he would have been happy “. The palaces were often places of musical entertainment with spaces created specifically for official occasions or theaters built inside the noble residences. Despite the closure due to the covid, the Borghese Gallery has always worked even in times of pandemic creating for the social channel audiovisual content online and products highly visited by the public, such as the ‘Conversations with writers’ made in tandem with Flaminia Patrizi Montoro. And there are numerous projects in the pipeline announced by the young and energetic director. “We would like to start working with young artists and with the Academies – he said – then there is a project dedicated to Pope Paul V Borghese, in collaboration with one of his descendants Alessandra, scheduled in the halls of the Gallery next October, linked to the recovery, in the archives, of ancient commissions and musical manuscripts, to the relationships between the other Borghese princes, Scipione and Giovanni Battista, with the composers of the time “. And in the celebrations of the two hundred years since Napoleon’s death, the homage could not be missing to Canova and his Paolina Borghese sculpted as the victorious Venus. “Canova re-proposes in a contemporary key the myth of Venus, eternal, very topical – explained Francesca Cappelletti – Figure of connection between heaven and earth. A positive symbol. I hope it can accompany us in this difficult year and I hope for a turning point”.