My Gallery in Rome

Tucked behind a heavy metal door in one of Rome’s oldest neighbourhoods, Rione Monti,Sacripante Gallery feels more like a secret society venue than an art gallery. Once inside, this feeling is reinforced by a space that looks nothing like your typically bland “white cube” gallery. Rough plastered walls of dark grey, bare cement floors incorporating recovered floor tiles, high oak beam ceilings exude a mystical, baroque atmosphere that harks back to the building’s past. Built in the 18th century as a convent by Cardinal Sacripante, whom the gallery is named after, the place has been completely renovated by architect and co-owner Francesca Giorgia Cerulli.
Naturally, no such club would be complete without a proper bar, that serves drinks in original decorated glasses from the 1920s and 30s. The bar’s design also pays homage to the Via Panisperna boys, a group of young physicists and chemists in the 1930s based in the Physics Institute down the street, who discovered slow neutrons —a discovery that subsequently led to the design of the nuclear reactor and the atomic bomb.