“Lettere di Maria Luigia d’Asburgo ” (7th December 2025-6th April 2026)

Free entrance

A crucial decade (1823–1833) in the life of the Habsburg duchess Maria Luigia comes back to life through two hundred letters she wrote to her daughter Albertina Montenuovo.

For the first time fully accessible and translated from French, this correspondence reveals a completely new—and in many ways unexpected—portrait of the sovereign of the Duchy of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla: a caring and attentive mother to her Montenuovo children (less so to François Bonaparte), a wife deeply in love with her “General,” a devoted daughter, closely attached to her father and the extended Habsburg family, an indefatigable traveller, fond of walks and mountain excursions, and an unparalleled visitor of theatres, gardens, menageries, exhibitions, factories, workshops, farms and everything she encountered along her path.

What also emerges is a strongly self-referential figure, plagued by constant illnesses and health concerns—real or presumed it is difficult to say—treated with endless remedies and often accompanied by states of sadness and melancholy caused by her distance from her dearest loved ones.

The “small” private history of a woman and her personality becomes the true protagonist of these letters, from which “great” history remains largely absent, only rarely perceptible in the background through distant echoes.

At the same time, these pages convey fashions, habits, passions and, more generally, the daily rhythms of an entire social class at the very peak of the hierarchy of the time, of which the duchess was an active member.

The exhibitions gives shape to the last publication of the Museum, offering a carousel of landscapes, people and objects.