The Municipal Art Gallery is located in the green of the Giardini Pubblici, a space acquired to become a garden by the Cagliari Town Hall in 1840 and whose main entrance was completed in 1939 by Ubaldo Badas.
The Gallery’s main façade, in neoclassical style, was built in 1828 to a design by Carlo Boyl of Putifigari while the original building block dates back to the late 18th century. It was originally the site of the royal powder magazine, while later, in the late 1920s, it underwent a radical renovation that also involved the area of the present embankment, by the refined Cagliari designer Ubaldo Baldas. In 1928 it was converted into a permanent art gallery. Following the 1999 gift of the “Francesco Paolo Ingrao Art Collection,” the Gallery was renovated. The Collection covers a time span from the mid-nineteenth century through the entire twentieth century and bears witness above all to the artistic movements that developed in Rome: from Secessionism in the 1910s to the troubled years of World War II, and from the postwar years to the 1980s. In 2004 new renovations further expanded the exhibition spaces, which were occupied by the Sardinian Collection of the Twentieth Century.
