Visitors to this museum can admire the gracefully elegant plaster casts by sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy, a Russian prince born on the banks of the Verbano who portrayed some of the most famous protagonists of the Belle Époque. In direct contrast are Arnaldo Ferraguti’s realistic portrayals of men, women and children, scorched by the sun, intent on tilling a field under the watchful gaze of the sharecropper.

These are some of the wonders on display at the local Landscape Museum because, as the founder Antonio Massara wrote, they are not just natural panoramas but images “of the intimate, profound and continuously changeable aspects imprinted by human life, images of the visible landscape of the world”.  Since it was established in 1909 the museum collection has amassed works of painting, sculpture, photography and archaeology that invite the visitor to engage with all the nuances of the lake and its valleys which, for centuries, have been sources of inspiration for artists, but it also invites reflection on many other shores and on the souls of their creators.

The Museum’s main site is the eighteenth-century Palazzo Viani Dugnani in Verbania Pallanza, where visitors can admire the Troubetzkoy Gipsoteca and the Pinacoteca. The Ornavasso Town Hall houses the Archaeology collection, while Casa Elide Ceretti in Intra hosts workshops, training sessions, temporary exhibitions and events.

The Troubetzkoy Gipsoteca (Plaster cast gallery) houses all the plaster works by the sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy (1866-1938). He was defined as an ‘impressionist sculptor’, due to his extraordinary ability to obtain the effect in sculpture that the scapigliatura painters created on canvas, that of splintering shapes to make them almost impalpable. Troubetzkoy bequeathed all his plaster casts to the Landscape Museum, including the imposing sketch for a monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi, almost three meters high, plus some discreet portraits of noblewomen, and busts of writers, musicians and artists encountered during his long life, including the famous bronze portraying Giovanni Segantini, one of the greatest exponents of Italian divisionism.

The Pinacoteca regularly presents new thematic installations, to rotate the countless masterpieces of its collection, which comprise artists such as scapigliato Daniele Ranzoni and his maestro Luigi Litta, the romantic mountainscape painter Federico Ashton, pointillists including Vittore Grubicy De Dragon, Carlo Fornara, Cesare Maggi and Guido Cinotti, plus twentieth-century masters such as Siro Penagini and Mario Tozzi. Not to be missed in this marvellous collection is Arnaldo Ferraguti's monumental masterpiece of social realism “Alla vanga” (Men of the Spade), dating back to 1890.

The sculpture collection vaunts a vast collection of works by Arturo Martini, one of the greatest sculptors of the Italian twentieth century.

Lastly, the museum’s archaeological collection at the Ornavasso site includes funerary accoutrements from the small Leponti community, a local population influenced by the Celtic communities and then gradually incorporated into the Roman world.