The museum collections has absorbed the previous Civic Museum of Contemporary Art (CIMAC), that closed in 1998. It had opened in 1984, in a temporary seat on the second floor of the Palazzo Reale, the CIMAC had about four hundred works which presented the Italian art scene of the twentieth century set up in thirty-seven small rooms. The opening of the museum, however, immediately showed the inadequacy of those far too small exhibition spaces, those intended to be deposits, which did not ensure optimal conditions for conserving the artwork, and not to mention, the shortage of economic resources available for maintaining the paintings. Hence, the decision in 1998 to close the museum, in conjunction with the Royal Palace renovation. The decision to convert the dell’Arengario spaces into the Novecento, dates back to 2000, to the then commissioner, Carrubba. The new Novecento Museum gave the collections back to the public, and proper recognition to those collectors, gallery owners and institutions over the course of more than a century who have collaborated to form one of the most important collections of Italian twentieth century art, witness of the perhaps the most creative and fertile art period in Italy.
Next, are the works of the fifties and sixties, a small room dedicated to Piero Manzoni and Azimuth, after which, thanks to the overhead walkway connecting the Arengario with the Royal Palace, the visitor has the opportunity to approach the art forms of the following decades: from the environments of the T Group, to Milanese analytical painting, the room dedicated to the pop art of Roman ancestry, a monographic exhibition dedicated to Luciano Fabro, ending with the Arte Povera installations. At the end of the tour, there is a section dedicated to the Marino Marini Collection, donated to the City of Milan in 1973.
