The artistic world of Mykhailo Hrushevsky—his tastes, preferences, and collections of antiquities—has already been widely written about. Perhaps it is best captured by Hrushevsky himself in his cultural essays “Around the World. From Travel Impressions”, which are about to celebrate their 115th anniversary. Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi enthusiastically called them exquisite and artistic, wishing that as many people as possible would experience pleasure from reading them.

Italian travels, the masterpieces of world art that the author was fortunate to see, left their mark on the collections of Mykhailo Hrushevsky and his sister Hanna, who always admired her elder brother’s tastes. Exquisite Florentine mosaics with delicate branches of roses and magnolias have long held the status of memorials, preserved for decades by descendants as family heirlooms, and now are displayed for the first time in their native House.

The exhibition project “In memoria dell’Italia” is as concise as Hrushevsky’s preface to “Around the World”: “a little artistry, a little historical tradition…”

• You will discover fascinating stories about Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s travels through Italy—at times passionate and emotional, at times ironic and melancholic;
• the unique aura of Venice’s artistic ladies and the Canal Grande, the panorama of the flower-like city of Florence, Rome’s greatest ancient monument—the Colosseum, Pompeii, and Vesuvius—all will appear before your eyes, including through postcards that the Hrushevskys sent to their relatives from their distant and delightful journey;
• thanks to an unknown photographer, we will take a peek into the famous workshop-gallery of Giovanni Ugolini, which for a century and a half (1868–2018) delighted travelers returning from Florence with mosaics in memoria dell’Italia;
• we will learn why Florentine mosaics are considered “eternal” and whether it is possible to create an authorial replica from any image of a “stone painting”;
• we will marvel at how the meticulous archivist Mykhailo Hrushevsky preserved Ugolini’s invoices and letters, which allowed researchers to identify which works the historian-traveler favored in Florence;
• the “scent” of rose and magnolia branches from the Florentine mosaics will be complemented by the taste of Italian Chianti, which Hrushevsky enjoyed during his travels.