The Centro Attività Espressive Villa Pacchiani became a permanent cultural centre in 1991.
It has held about 90 exhibitions, all high level ones and almost all conceived and produced by the Centro itself. Its purpose is to show a wide range of artistic production and its correlation with culture in general. In particular it aims to document and to help in clarifying the various aspects of contemporary art.
The Centro is made up by a large exhibition space (nine rooms), the venue for 5-6 exhibitions each year and by the Gabinetto dei disegni e delle stampe (Drawings and Prints Space) which contains contemporary works of Italian and foreign graphic that are made available to scholars.
The Gabinetto was established in 1992 with a generous and large endowment of works by Tono Zancanaro made by his adopted son Manlio Gaddi. That core represented for the Centro, then directed by Romano Masoni, and for the Commune of Santa Croce sull’Arno the occasion to open a public collection of graphics. That event had a significant impact in directing the cultural and exhibition choices of the Centro towards graphics that, because of its characteristics and its current artistic orientations, requires special sensibility, competence and dedication.
The fact that the town of Santa Croce has always had a vast base practising engraving, with many clubs and associations, was another element which encouraged that choice.
The Zancanaro endowment (about 40 drawings and about 15 engravings) was followed by others, often in connection with important exhibitions, accurately documented by the catalogues edited by Nicola Micieli. It was so that the corpus of the works in the Gabinetto reached the present 3000.
Since 2001 a relevant contribution to the acquisitions has been provided by the Premio Santa Croce Grafica (Santa Croce Graphics Prize), conceived by the second and present director of the Centro, Eugenio Cecioni.
The purpose of that biennial prize, that has reached its fourth edition, is to reaffirm the predilection of the area for artistic graphics and, at the same time, to update, promote and make known the results and the studies in that field. Artists willingly donate their works to the Gabinetto and, thanks to the national character of the prize and its large and very qualified participation, in the last years the collection has greatly grown in number of artists, techniques and regions represented.
Remarkable is also the presence in the Gabinetto of a collection of ex-libris and small size graphic works by international artists. Those works were shown in the exhibition The Great Ex-Libris and Small SizeGraphic Works Calcographers. The interest thus awaken led to establish another biennial prize, this time international: the Premio Santa Croce Ex-Libris, Piccola Grafica (Santa Croce Ex-Libris and Small Size Graphic Works Prize), which will also enrich the collection.
The Gabinetto collection, with its heterogeneous techniques and styles. wants to provide an adequate documentation of the different declinations of the ample “graphic” genre.
The large size reached by the collection made necessary to reorganize its classification and its custodial services. This was realized in cooperation with the University of Pisa under the supervision of the Pisa Supertindency.
The Collection, an entity in progress, both for the number of works and that of the artists, represents a wealth which can only be a reason of pride for boast for the Centro Attività Espressive Villa Pacchiani and for the town of Santa Croce sull’Arno.
Present authors in Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe
Edgardo Abbozzo, Jacopo Abis, Ruslan Agibra, Gian Carlo Aiosa, Renato Alessandrini, Kostantin Antioukhin,
Massimo Arduini, Peter Augustovich, Eva Aulmann, Nino Bacco, Marco Bagnoli, Ermes Bajoni, Corrado Balest, Ryszard Balon, Emilio Baracco, Robert Baramov, Carlo Barbero, Nicoletta Barga, Vittorio Basaglia, Nicolai Batakov, Serafino Beconi, Erhard Beitz, David Bekker, Mario Bellagamba, Romola Bellandi, Maria Bellomo, Gianluigi Bellucci, Andreina Bertelli, Giampaolo Berto, Marcin Bialas, Antonio Bobò, Giovanna Bombarda, Clara Borgo, Jiri Brazda, Agato Bruno, Albin Brunovsky, Zdenek Bugan, Augustinas Virgilijus Burba, Vincenzo Burlizzi, Renzo Bussotti, Silvia Cagnani, Vito Calabrò, Ezio Camorani, Manuela Candini, Stefano Canepari, Nado Canuti, Andrea Carini, Rodolfo Ceccotti, Natalija Cernetsova, Stefano Cesari, Livio Ceschin, Manlio Chieppa, Kam Cheung Choi, Paolo Ciampini, Stefano Ciaponi, Angela Colombo, Mario Colonna, Bruno Colorio, Giuliana Consilvio, Patrizia Contardi, Mauro Corbani, Vito Cotugno, Luca Crippa, Renzo Crivelli, Patrizia D'Orazio, Vitaliano De Angelis, Furio De Denaro, Paolo De Polo, Antonio De Rossi, Luce Delhove, Marcello Della Valle, Karel Demel, Gianni Demo, Oleg Denisenko, Grazyna Didelyte, Gino Di Pieri, Patrizio Di Sciullo, Fernando Di Stefano, Giorgio Di Venere, Elisabetta Diamanti, Pietro Diana, Gunter Dollhopf, Wally Doni, Josef Dudek, Franco Dugo, Rudinskas Egidijus, Paola Emiliani, Alda Failoni, Franco Fanelli, Giuseppe Fantinato, Enzo Faraoni, Fernando Farulli, Gianni Favaro, Ferdinando Fedele, Diana Ferrara, Francesco Ferrovecchio, Mario Filipponi, Mariano Fracalossi, Monica Franchini, Paolo Fraternali, Domenico Fratianni, Onorina Frazzi, Maria Cristina Galli, Oscar Gallo, Giuseppe Gambino, Vincenzo Gatti, Enrico Gaudino, Daniele Gay, Lai Gideon, Paola Ginepri, Chiara Giorgetti, Paolo Girardello, Hanna Glowacka, Bruno Gozzo, Dusan Grecner, Alexander Grigoriev, Hayk Grigoryan, Paola Grienti Nasso, Calisto Gritti, Alvise Guadagnino, Mario Guadagnino, Luigi Guerricchio, Katsunori Hamanishi, Pavel Hlavaty, Siu Chung Alex Ho, Carla Horat Albiero, Sergey Hrapov, Mei Yee Clara Hung, Marina Ingravallo, Maura Israel, Siergiy Ivanov, Jurij Jakovenko, Edo Janich, Giovanni Job, Lucy Jochamowitz, Julian Jordanov, Harry Jurgens, Konstantin Kalynovich, Jeny Katelieva, Nina Kazimova, Eriko Kito, Antanas Kmielauskas, Peter Kocak, Dimo Kolibarov, Swietlan Kraczyna, Cheng Tai Kwo, Barbara La Ragione, Amedeo Lanci, Andrea Lelario, Simonetta Leonetti Luparini, Giuseppina Lesa, Eva Lipartiti, Stefano Lo Presti, Bruno Lo Porchio, Dilvo Lotti, Wojciech Luczak, Cesco Magnolato, Oi Yee Hung Malou, Ulderico Manani, Alberto Manfredi, Laura Manfredi, Raffaello Margheri, Renzo Margonari, Amalia Marzato, Antonio Mascia, Ilaria Masetti, Romano Masoni, Linda Mazzanti, Riccardo Mazzarino, Ilario Menem, Luigi Merlo, Muriel Merzario, Elisa Mestroni, Elettra Metallinò, Ivan Miladinovic, Elisabetta Miniotti Viarengo, Bruno Missieri, Erminia Mitrano, Aki Miyajima, Vairo Mongatti, Silvia Montanelli, Ivo Mosele, Gianluca Murasecchi, Oleg Naboka, Hristo Naidenov, Luciana Nespeca, Elena Novikova, Iurij Nozdrin, Maria Linda Nunziata, Carolina Occari, Claudio Olivotto, Maurizio Olivotto, Manuel Ortega, Juri Orlov, Nello Pacchietto, Roberto Pacella, Angelo Pagliarulo, Andrea Pagnacco, Riccarda Pagnozzato, Albino Palma, Toni Pecoraro, Lorena Pedemonte, Maria Rosaria Perrella, Massimo Petringa, Antonio Pettinichi, Walter Piacesi, Antonio Piazza, Ernesto Piccolo, Bohdan Pikulytzky, Enrico Piras, Erminio Poretti, Michele Porta, Gianfranco Quaresimin, Alessandra Ragionieri, Roberto Rampinelli, Fabrizio Rebesco, Alberto Rocco, Giorgio Roggino, Franco Rognoni, Gina Roma, Mario Romoli, Mino Rosi, Renato Santini, Walter Sarfatti, Mario Scarpati, Gianfranco Schialvino, Francesco Sciaccaluga, Aniello Scotto, Aldo Segatto, Andrea Serafini, Tomura Shigeki, Paolo Smali, Giacomo Soffiantino, Ottavio Spagnoli, Severino Spazzini, Raimondo Squizzato, Bruno Starita, Attilio Steffanoni, Roberto Stelluti, Roberto Streglio, Claudia Tamburelli, Paolo Pietro Tarasco, Augusta Tassisto, Gino Terreni, Teresita Terreno, Pietro Tinu, Togo, Roberto Tonelli, Franco Torcianti, Piero Tredici, Giovanni Turria, Sergej Tyukanov, Sergey Udovinienko, Maria Fabiola Ungredda, Barbara Vaccari, Walter Valentini, Frank-Ivo Van Damme, Katarina Vavrova, Peter Velikov, Zoltan Ven, Vladimir Vereschagin, Gianni Verna, Galeazzo Viganò, Domenico Viggiano, Laura Villani, Vanni Viviani, Remo Wolf, Czeslaw Kazimierz Wos, Yulian Dimitrov Yordanov, Yuen Hong John Yu, Danute Zalnierute, Tono Zancanaro, Laura Zanobini, Karel Zeman, Giuseppe Zigaina, Marina Ziggiotti, Giordano Zorzi, Vladimir Zuev, Giuseppe Zunica
The Centro Attività Espressive Villa Pacchiani became a permanent cultural centre in 1991.