Galleria di Roma
In 1930, the Galleria di Roma opened on Via Veneto 7 in the Palazzo Coppedè, the headquarters of the Fascist Confederation of Professionals and Artists, a stone’s throw from the Ministry of Corporations.

Director Pier Maria Bardi, a former gallery owner in Milan, and Cipriano Efisio Oppo wanted to create an art center that was distinguished yet not too official, a barometer of emerging ideas in Italian painting that was also open to the foreign avant-garde.
Cipriano Efisio Oppo convinced Mussolini that an art gallery partly financed by the National Confederation, alongside the Quadriennale, would realize his plan to make Rome a hub for the dialogue and bringing together of national ideas.

The Galleria di Roma was born, with its patron Mussolini providing a personal grant of a hundred thousand lire.
The first exhibition
Galleria di Roma opened with a retrospective of Armando Spadini, followed by a show of works by the young Mario Mafai and Scipione in November 1930 that was a hit with critics and the public.
In 1933 Bardi left the gallery to take over “Quadrante,” a literary journal on Italian rationalist architecture.
In 1937 C. Pavolini, the president of the Confederation of Professionals and Artists, hired two new directors for the Galleria di Roma, now renovated and located in Piazza Colonna: Dario Sabatello for visual arts and Anton Giulio Bragaglia for the theatrical section tied to the Teatro delle Arti.

The gallery reopened on June 2, 1937 with a tribute to 16 Italian artists including Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Amedeo Modigliani, Felice Casorati, Giorgio De Chirico, Morandi, Ferruccio Ferrazzi, Arturo Martini, Gino Severini, and Sironi.
It later moved to the Teatro delle Arti on Via Sicilia.