Founded in 1796 by Giacomo Carrara, the Accademia Carrara is considered the museum of Italian collecting , because its collections are based entirely on bequests from enlightened patrons who wanted to increase its heritage by making it available to the city and the community.

The exhibition itinerary is organized in sixteen rooms of different sizes, which tell different stories. The first sequence is dedicated to Italian art between Gothic and Renaissance in the Peninsula, with an emphasis on the conspicuous nucleus of fifteenth-century works from the Po Valley and Veneto, with works by Pisanello , Mantegna and Bellini , and on contemporary Tuscan production, where the paintings of Raphael and Botticelli .

The second sequence, however, draws a path that illustrates the figurative tradition between Lombardy and the Venetian dominions of the Mainland, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, with particular attention to the Bergamo context, where Lotto , Moroni , Baschenis and Fra Galgario worked. Finally, the section dedicated to the nineteenth century with a focus on the events and protagonists of the Accademia Carrara School of painting.