The exhibition begins with a comparison between the paintings from the Rosai Bequest and the artist's works from the Alberto Della Ragione Collection, brought together for the first time in a single exhibition.
Divided into two distinct spaces, the exhibition explores the figures and places dear to Ottone Rosai, providing a complex picture of the painter and his relationship with his city and the intellectuals of his time.
The exhibition is complemented by a selection of documents from the Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G.P. Vieusseux and from the Archivio Contemporaneo Alessandro Bonsanti.

Approximately 70 works are on display, highlighting two cornerstones of the artist's research: the faces of his friends and his city, Florence, experienced as an interior landscape and the setting for a shared experience.
For Rosai, his friendships with writers, poets, publishers, and artists were not simply a biographical backdrop, but a genuine space for exchange and education, directly influencing his worldview and his conception of art as an exercise in sincerity.
In his portraits, loved ones emerge as silent presences, charged with affection and moral tension, bearers of a profound truth, often tinged with melancholy. The artist's letters also reveal bonds experienced as necessary, sometimes life-saving, sometimes painful.

The places Rosai paints are not simple views: the streets, hills, monuments, and isolated houses of Florence become interior spaces, living organisms with which the artist forges a physical and moral relationship. Via di San Leonardo, the great churches, Palazzo Vecchio, and the urban margins depict a city far from idealization, charged with restraint, gravity and resistance.
Rosai's works are characterized by tensions between light and shadow, stability and precariousness, belonging and solitude. Rosai's places are inseparable from the people who passed through them and the words that described them: writers, poets, and friends share with him the same emotional geography, made up of nocturnal walks, meetings in cafés, workrooms, and suburbs.

The dense network of relationships revealed by the paintings and archival documents paints an image of mid-twentieth-century Florence as a living fabric, in which Rosai moves as an interpreter simultaneously central and irregular.
Capable of absolute devotion and radical ruptures, the artist opens his gaze to the drama of existence, always guided by an ethical conception of art. His figures evoke a restless community, sharing a humanity marked by the struggle to exist and the need to continue to believe in poetry.
On display, among other portraits, are those of Eugenio Montale, Giorgio De Chirico, Elio Vittorini, Carlo Bo, Piero Bigongiari, and the Marquis of Villanova.