Opening of the Pinacoteca di Brera, reconstructed after the bombing of 1943.

After four years of arduous scientific, technical, administrative, diplomatic and political work, the director Fernanda Wittgens opens the Pinacoteca di Brera with the presence of the highest governmental authorities. Already the director since 1940 and the first woman at the helm of an Italian museum, Wittgens made great efforts to safeguard the works of art against the imminent atrocities of the war. After having been imprisoned by the Fascists during the last year of the conflict due to her repeated initiatives to help the Jewish community in Milan, starting in 1945 she was in charge of the work for the opening of the “Grande Brera”. Seventy years later, on 9 June 2020, the galleries of the Pinacoteca symbolically reopened on the same day, after three months of lockdown.