THE ITALIAN Cultural Institute and the Estorick Collection do much to promote modern and contemporary Italian art, but Barbara Behan's gallery is one of the few places where it is possible to buy such work from someone with specialist knowledge of movements from Futurism to Arte Povera.
Italy has always been a divided nation - the industrial north and the agrarian, Mediterranean south; a nation with the weight of art history carried on its shoulders, where museums and galleries are packed with paintings from the Renaissance to the Baroque.
Fascism has also been a problematic legacy for post-war artists. There are no Italian equivalents to the German Kiefer and …