Alessandra Di Castro
Alessandra Di Castro S.r.l.
CONTATTI
Alessandra Di Castro S.r.l.
Piazza di Spagna 4
00187 Roma (RM)
T +39 06 69923127
F +39 06 69790070

info@alessandradicastro.com
www.alessandradicastro.com

I opened the gallery in Piazza di Spagna 4 soon after my 40th birthday, with the support of my father: today it is the sole address of my antiques business. Every year I exhibit at Tefaf in Maastricht (since 1998). I also participate in the Florence International Biennial Antiques Fair, and since 2020, in Modenantiquaria. From 2011 to 2022, I participated in Tefaf New York Fall, and from 2011 to 2022, in Masterpiece Fair London. After jointly organizing an exhibition at Academy Mansion in New York in 2015, I started a collaboration with Galerie Kugel and Galerie Brimo de Laroussilhe. From 2016 to 2019, we shared an exhibition space on Madison Avenue, where we organized several exhibitions that well suited the artistic calendar of the city. I took part in the Hong Kong Masterpiece Pavilion in October 2019, in a stand shared with European antique dealers and gallery owners within the Fine Art Asia sphere in Hong Kong. Among the latest publications of the Gallery I can mention: - F. Leone: Per Johann Paul Schor Pittore. Il Carro d’Oro del Principe Borghese per il Carnevale di Roma del 1664 (2017) - The Bernini Arsenale of Civitavecchia by Viviano Codazzi and Filippo Lauri, 1668, (2018) - Prince Stanislaw Poniatowski's Gems (2019) As for my academic studies, I graduated in Decorative and Figurative Arts from the London Study Centre. I graduated in Italian Studies from La Sapienza University in Rome, focusing on a virtuoso animal painter of neoclassical Rome: Wenzel Peter, whose works, portraits of resting animals or scenes of struggle from the Antique, decorate the Galleria Borghese and the Pinacoteca Vaticana. In April 2019, I was awarded the Iris Foundation Award by the Bard Graduate Center in New York. In February 2021, I took part in a competition for a teaching post in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at La Sapienza University on the theme “Storia della Connoisseurship e metodi di riconoscimento delle arti decorative italiane". Since December 2021, I have held the position of Vice President of the Antiquarian Association of Italy (AAI) after serving as its President from December 2019 to December 2021 and as a Councilor since 2006. I am a member of the Steering Committee of the Florence International Biennial Antiques Fair and of the Exhibitor Committee of Masterpiece London. In June 2020 I was appointed as a member of the Board Of Trustees of TEFAF, and since June 2022, I have been a member of the Executive Committee. In 2012 I was given the post of Director of the Jewish Museum of Rome, where I worked as a volunteer, and held it until 2017. During that period, with Francesco Leone and Arnold Nesselrath, I co-curated the exhibition "Menorà: Culto, Storia e Mito at the Museo Ebraico di Roma and the Vatican Museums" from May to July 2017. In February 2019, I was appointed President of the Foundation for the Museo Ebraico di Roma, an undertaking I fulfil in close collaboration with the Jewish Community and with the support of various international philanthropic associations. The Di Castro family have been working in the world of antiques in Rome for four generations. Alberto Di Castro, son of Leone - also an antiquarian - left his father's firm in Borgo in the 1930s to set up his shop in Via del Babuino 102. After the racist persecutions, he managed to reopen the antique furniture and silverware gallery, and he expanded the exhibition spaces over the years with a second entrance on Piazza di Spagna. The Di Castro firm was renowned for its pioneering and far-sighted enhancement of what is known as the fasto romano from the 1950s. Franco Di Castro, my father, further expanded the range of the family business, becoming ever more interested in Old Master paintings and working with fine results in the international market; he brought a large number of works of art back to Italy: they are now partly exhibited in public collections. Ever since we were young, my brother Alberto and I helped our father in the management of the historical gallery, a favourite destination for collectors, antique-dealers, art historians, museum curators, administrators of Italian public cultural agencies, lovers and enthusiasts of antiques from all over the world, stimulated and drawn by the originality of our choices. In 2009 I decided to open my gallery in Piazza di Spagna 4. I launched it with an exhibition of cameos and carved gems. The knowledge and study of what I love to buy, rare and curious objects, coloured marbles, mosaics, paintings and sculptures, is a pivotal point of the profession I chose as a child, watching my father at work. This noble trade with a great tradition makes the reliability and trust earned from a varied, cosmopolitan, often highly cultivated and trained clientele, a determining element in the sales process. I tackle every new project, whether it be the publication of a discovery or the exhibition space at an international fair, with courage and the declared ambition of presenting moments and actors in the history of art to the public the ones that have been little studied or insufficiently valued by critics: this generates surprising combinations. I never forego the exceptional quality, authenticity and originality that characterizes the attentive choice of each individual work. This is also done to promote and communicate the kaleidoscopic, inexhaustible, sometimes disorienting, wealth of the Italian decorative and figurative arts to an increasingly global and demanding market.

MICHELANGELO BARBERI
(Rome 1787 - Rome 1867)

Round table top in black marble with micromosaic depicting morning glory, jasmine, butterflies, a dragonfly and a lizard in trompe l’oeil

Rome, 1840
Black marble with micromosaic inlay, 880 (ø) mm

Signed and dated: “Cav. M. Ang. Barberi Roma, 1840”


GIACOMO RAFFAELLI
(Rome 1753 - 1836)

The Grotto of Neptune in Tivoli

Rome, 1799
Micromosaic, 73 (ø) mm

Signed and dated on the back: “Giacomo Raffaelli fece in Roma 1799”


GIACOMO RAFFAELLI
(Rome 1753 - 1836)

Pair of minute mosaics bordered in antique red marble with gilded wooden frames carved with laurel leaves

Roma, Ultimo quarto del XVIII secolo
Coppia di mosaici minuti bordati di marmo rosso antico con cornici in legno dorato e intagliato con foglie di alloro a bacca, 370 x 300 mm