The idea for the Microcollection Museum came to Elisa Bollazzi, now its Director, in May 1990 when she was visiting the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and – almost by chance – picked up a few fragments that had accidentally fallen onto the floor from a fantastic work by Anish Kapoor.

These “micro-particles”, overlooked by everyone else, opened up a whole new world, an intuition of a new form of creation. They triggered a completely fresh approach to meandering in the international art circuits.

From then on the search was for new micro-acquisitions that would otherwise be trodden underfoot and chucked out with the rubbish, re-experiencing each time the magic of that first special moment of intuition, the creative act.

Microcollection now boasts hundreds fragments of contemporary artworks that Elisa Bollazzi and her spontaneous accomplices have saved from oblivion. The fragments are mounted on ordinary laboratory slides, and can be viewed under a microscope.

The collection constitutes a patrimony of considerable artistic and cultural worth, and the public seems to be showing increasing curiosity and appreciation of this new artistic experience.