Open House Tour with Sveva Caetani

Accès

À propos

Join us for an open house at the Caetani Centre during Culture Days from Sept. 23 to 26. Take a self-guided tour of our 130-year-old heritage home museum featuring new displays of Caetani family collections. Learn their fascinating story of Italian nobility, immigration to Canada, and about our benefactor Sveva Caetani's isolation and reemergence into society as a respected mentor, teacher and artist.

New to the tour is recently found film footage of Sveva as she talks about her Recapitulation painting series in detail. The films will be reeled throughout the open house in the Caetani Library for people to come watch at their leisure.

About Sveva Caetani and Recapitulation:

Born in Rome in 1917, Sveva Caetani was descended from Italian nobility. After early years of privilege followed by long reclusion in Vernon, she emerged into the public eye through art. Upon her death, her family home was entrusted to the community, and today it thrives as the Caetani Centre.

In the mid-1980s, Sveva began work on what would culminate her creative accomplishments, an extensive collection of 47 artworks, comprised of 60 separate large, luminous watercolours. Recapitulation is a symbolic interpretation of Sveva’s journey through life, accompanied by her father as her guide, and inspired by Dante’s long poem Inferno from the Divine Comedy, examining the human condition.

Upon completion of her works, Sveva approached the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (AFA) with a generous offer to donate the entire Recapitulation series to the AFA collection in Edmonton with the agreement that the foundation would preserve the series adhering to archival standards for storage, presentation and display. The AFA also provided access to the collection through exhibition loans and an online database. The Recapitulation series was exhibited in Vancouver, Nanaimo, Ottawa, Toronto, and Edmonton.

In 2021, 35 years after the first Recapitulation painting traveled to Edmonton to be archived by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Sveva’s works returned to Vernon permanently to the care and collection of Sveva’s namesake legacy, the Caetani Cultural Centre Society.

In 2025, the collection, along with select other Caetani works, will be exhibited in its entirety for the first time, and for the first time outside of Canada, at MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome. The exhibition, titled Sveva Caetani: Forma e Frammento, opens October 3, 2025, and runs through January 4, 2026, in Italy.

Liens

• For more information: caetani.org

Organisateur

Caetani Centre

The Caetani Centre is the former home of renowned artist, writer, mentor and teacher Sveva Caetani.

Sveva Caetani was a visionary figure in the North Okanagan community with a deep belief in the power of art, culture, and the pursuit of knowledge to enrich and change lives and cultivate community.

Sveva left her 1.3 acres of gardens and historic home to the community of Greater Vernon in 1994 with the express wish that it serve as a community cultural facility for artistic and critical exploration.

Now open to the public, the Caetani Centre is available for both guided and self-guided heritage tours. Visitors can learn about the fascinating royal Italian Caetani family history and story and see select displays of treasured family artifacts in the heritage home.

The mysterious and heartbreaking story behind the history of the house and its inhabitants provides a gateway to understanding our recent past, and opens a window to a much different world, shedding light on the many artworks and writings created by our benefactor Sveva Caetani.