Washington and Piacenza, apparently two places that having nothing to do with each other, but now have a common denominator, proposed by an exhibition that celebrates simultaneously in the same venue art masterpieces from these cities.  From 15th September to 18th January 2009 Palazzo Baldeschi al Corso in Perugia is hosting the exhibition “Corot to Picasso. Fattori to De Pisis” dedicated to the famous American Phillips Collection and to the Italian Collection of Ricci Oddi .
The exhibition, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, is promoted by the Foundation Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia which is thus celebrating the Saving Bank’s 100th year.
Main theme of the exhibition, in this case, is not a group of artists or a specific artistic period, although the two collections are chronologically very close, but the passion for art collecting, which in many cases has not been an end in itself, but has supported museums and exhibitive poles of consistent collections.
The first of the two collections to be created was the Phillips Collection, which opened in 1921 and was for all the twentieth century, and still is nowadays, one of the most prestigious and richest collections of American and European art.
The artists taken into consideration include Degas, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Cézanne, Picasso, Monet, Daumier, Braque, Corot, Courbet, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Modigliani, Manet, Odilon Redon, Sisley, Utrillo, Rousseau and Renoir, whose “Oarsman’s Breakfast” purchased in 1923 is considered one of the museum’s most famous works.
The Phillips Collection is the first museum of modern art in America featuring about 2,500 works and situated in the 1897 Georgian Revival residence, owned by its founder, Duncan Phillips (1886-1966), and in other minor residences of the Dupont Circle district of Washington.  Duncan, born in Pittsburg, grandson of the banker James Laughlin, moved with his family to Washington, D.C. in 1895 and, after the precocious and unexpected death of his father and his brother, he founded with his mother, Eliza Laughlin Phillips, the Phillips Memorial Gallery.
Starting from a small series of works Duncan Phillips continued enriching his collection to the point that, in 1930, he decided to move into a new house and adapt  his previous residence on the 21st  street  as a museum: museum that he always considered as “a memorable and beneficial strength in the community I live in, an influence that gives joy and improves life by helping people to see beauty as it seen by artists”. Subsequently, with his wife and artist Marjorie Acker, Duncan Phillips managed to collect more than 2,000 works of art, often making revolutionary choices for his time, when America still looked at modernism with an eye of  scepticism, but without forgetting masters of the past who had opened the road to modernity, including El Greco, Jean Simeon Charadin and Edouard Manet.
A prevalently Italian flavour characterizes the Collection of Ricci Oddi. Giuseppe Ricci Oddi (1868-1937), after a youth dedicated to sports and law studies between Rome and Turin, approached almost casually the world of art, which then became his greatest passion.   Thanks to his agricultural and industrial earnings, he managed to glean an important group of works, following rigorous criteria, according to which only figurative works were included while blatantly avant-gardist  works were banned. 
Ricci Oddi collected paintings, sculptures and graphical works from the romantic nineteenth century to his time, right up to the nineteen-thirties.  For as much as we can think of the Collection of Ricci Oddi as a local, territorial collection, its promoter actually went beyond the local ambit, resting his eyes on the long-range artistic production of those years.  Purchases mainly took place at the Biennial of Venice and in the main Italian cities, with the support of a network of advisors such as friends who were passionate about art, art historians, gallery owners and traders, and sometimes the artists themselves.   The declared objective was to follow and document the development of art in Italy (to which important foreign examples were added) in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the following one. 
In 1924 the collection was given to the city of Piacenza and Ricci Oddi had the building made at his own expenses, specifically studied to house the collection, that was inaugurated in 1931. The art names of this collection include Hayez,  il Piccio, Fattori , Lega, Signorini, Fontanesi, Boldini,  De Nittis, Zandomeneghi, Pellizza da Volpedo, Boccioni, Carrà, Carena, Campigli,  De Pisis and Casorati and the foreign artists  Carl Larsson,  Albin Egger-Lienz, Auguste Ravier and Augustus Koopman.

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(translated by Giorgina Arcuri)