Situated within the Parchi di Nervi, close to three other museums – the Gallery of Modern Art, the Frugone Collections and the Museum Luxoro – the Wolfsoniana offers the visitor a visual and storytelling survey of the period between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, focusing particularly on the decorative and propaganda arts. A visit to the Wolfsoniana begins with an exploration of the taste for the exotic that was popular in Italy in the late 1880s and examines the main artistic currents of the first decades of the twentieth century, from Art Nouveau to Art Deco and from the Novecento movement to Rationalism.

Thanks to the broad range of objects (paintings, sculpture, furniture, interiors, glassware, ceramics, wrought iron, silverware, fabrics, architectural drawings, graphic art, posters and advertising material, sketches and drawings, books and magazines), drawn largely from Italy but with significant international contributions, the Wolfsoniana Collection documents not only the aesthetic values of the individual items, but also the most profound historical and social aspects of the period.

The fruit of the avid collecting of Mitchell Wolfson Jr., the Wolfsoniana is the Italian partner of  The Wolfsonian, a museum and research center located in Miami Beach. Micky Wolfson’s collection is in fact divided between the United States and Italy: The Wolfsonian in Florida, which is a campus of Florida International University since 1997, and the Wolfsoniana in Genoa, incorporated in and managed by the Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura.

The Wolfsoniana, which works closely with the Research Center at the Palazzo Ducale, displays a large selection of works from the collection along a chronological-thematic layout.