Alla ricerca dei frammenti perduti: per una ricostruzione virtuale delle collezioni dei conventi francescani di Mantova. San Francesco e la Beata Vergine delle Grazie in Curtatone.

The essay involves a peculiar city - Mantua- and a peculiar religious order - the Franciscans -, and focuses on a peculiar convent devoted to St. Francis and on the monastery of Beata Vergine delle Grazie in Curtatone (Mn). The first, situated within the city walls, is the prime cluster of the Mantuan State, highly connnotated with worship and honour. The former, outside the city, was built in a strategic location, easily to reach both by water and by land. It is the pilgrimage suburbian site. From the XIV to the XV centuries, the Gonzaga dynasty chose the St. Francis convent as the location of their burials. That choice is evidence of the political and religious importance of the convent. "Capitano" Francesco I Gonzaga, at the end of XIV century, ordered to build the convent as "ex-voto" for the end of the plague. He also summoned the Franciscans in the convent. During centuries both the monuments have undergone radical changes: in the XVIII and XIX the monasteries were closed and dramatically hit in their architectonic structure and artistic collections. At the end of the XVIII century the St. Francis convent had been used as an arsenal, and during the World War II it was bombed. In the XVIII century the monastery of Beata Vergine delle Grazie had been transformed into an hospital, while in the 1810s it was sold to a private and most buildings were destroyed. During these years many works of art had been lost. Nowadays the only hints of the past are the convent inventories and maps, the documents and the art history guides. Not always what is missing is also lost, so it is possible to rebuilt, although on paper, what our ancestors could have seen with their own eyes.