In the historical heart of Naples, the three floors of the 19th century Palazzo Donnaregina house the Madre - Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina.
Purchased in 2005 by the Campania Region to be used as a museum for contemporary art, the building has been restored and turned into a museum based on a project by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement 2012; with the collaboration of Studio DAZ-Dumontet Antonini Zaske architetti associati of Naples, in addition to the purely exhibition part, a library, a media library, a bookshop-cafeteria area have been realized, for a total of 7,200 square meters.
Among the artists present in its permanent collection, housed on the second floor of the building, are Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Anisk Kapoor, Richard Serra, Jannis Kounellis, Rebecca Horn and Sol LeWitt.
Through numerous important temporary exhibitions, the Madre has become a witness to a history that has made Campania a crossroads of all contemporary arts, aimed at studying and documenting the past through the most current sensibility and languages, and therefore able to act in the present and outline the future.