The cause of finding a more adequate venue for these collections had long been championed by illustrious figures in Neapolitan culture, but the definitive decision was only reached after the Second World War. It was Bruno Molajoli, Soprintendente of the Art galleries and works in Campania, who secured a consensus on the royal palace of Capodimonte, albeit in the face of numerous reservations. There was in fact a cogent precedent for the decision, since from the mid-18th century through to 1799 the austere building standing in its hilltop park had housed the Farnese and Bourbon collections on its piano nobile, the first and only museum open to visitors in eighteenth century Naples. From the turn of the century and up until the arrival of the Savoia dynasty in 1861 it was used exclusively by the court. Thereafter, with the Dukes of Aosta in residence, the piano nobile was once again laid out in accordance with museographic criteria with sculptures and nineteenth century paintings, porcelain ware of Neapolitan and European manufacture, tapestries and other prestigious artefacts largely originating in Naples or drawn from the Farnese and Bourbon sections of the famous Royal Armoury.

Work on creating the new Museum, financed by the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, finally got under way in the early fifties, to a blueprint produced by Ezio De Felice and with the collaboration, each in his own way, of Ferdinando Bologna in particular, Raffaello Causa and Oreste Ferrari. The work benefited from the enthusiasm which greeted the vast task of rebuilding the country as a whole, and was terminated with what for those times represented a minimum of delay.

The new layout of the sumptuous rooms on the piano nobile featuring the nineteenth century collections and furnishings of the Historic Apartments, and above all the restructuring of both the second floor, to house the new Picture Gallery, and the attics, for restorers laboratories and storage rooms, meant that the Palace was entirely given over to its vocation as a Museum, complete with library open to the public and guest rooms able to accommodate scholars from Italy and abroad.

The choice made by Molajoli and the outcome of the interventions drawn up by De Felice proved to be decidedly pioneering in terms of museographic criteria, serving as a benchmark both in Italy and on the international circuit.

Subsequently exhibitions featuring the arts in Naples in the Seicento and Settecento, Caravaggio and his times, and a cross-section of French Impressionist painters from American museums, succeeded in reawakening the interest of Neapolitans, which had too long lain dormant. They rediscovered the extraordinarily high level of culture and civilization which the city, in spite of its never-ending problems and contradictions, had achieved in the past. This served on one hand to increase the number of visitors to the Museum, and on the other highlighted the need to set about redistributing the permanent collections so as to link them more closely and more visibly to the various events that had seen the Palace as protagonist and the different episodes in the history of the arts in Naples.
This operation was set in train in the second half of the 1980s when, thanks to substantial funding made available by the F.I.O., a comprehensive project was drawn up involving on one hand the modernisation of obsolete technical systems and structures and on the other a new presentation of the museum's collections based on their historical constitution.

This work, begun in the late eighties, reached a first milestone, notwithstanding endless difficulties and soul-destroying inertia, on 28 September 1995 with the inauguration of the exhibition of art at the Farnese Court, mounted in the lavish, restored rooms of the piano nobile. Thereafter, repristinating the state of affairs in the mid-18th century, these rooms featured the paintings and objects from the celebrated Farnese collection, and the furnishings of the Royal Apartments were newly displayed in chronological order.

In the years 1996 - 1998, timed to coincide with two exhibitions featuring contemporary art and the arts in Naples in the 19th century, the outstanding interventions required in the rooms on the second floor and the attics were completed. In a sort of re-evocation of Joachim Murat's idea of a galleria napoletana for what became the Real Museo Borbonico, the second floor now houses paintings and sculptures by those artists of various provenance and formation who left a lasting mark on the Neapolitan artistic milieu from the 13th to the 18th century. Also on this floor, and in the vast restructured premises beneath the roof, we have provisionally displayed a selection of 19th century art and works by those artists who, on the strength of an ideal and cultural affinity with Naples and its prestigious historical and artistic heritage, have exhibited their work at Capodimonte ever since 1978. This is in fact the only case in Italy of a museum of medieval and modern art which has a section dedicated to contemporary art, ensuring a fruitful 'contamination' between ancient and modern, past and present.

Now that its original dual nature of royal residence and prestigious museum has been restored; that its vocation as a museum has been extended to contemporary art; that it has mounted exhibitions of outstanding cultural importance (from Caravaggio in his final years to Velazquez and court portraiture at the time of Titian); and that new acquisitions of art from the Quattro to Ottocento have been made, and important long term loans of contemporary works secured, Capodimonte, the new Museum of Capodimonte, can truly claim to have notched up its first half century.