There is a subtle thread, stretching back 150 years, that connects Turin to Japan. His name is Antonio Fontanesi, a painter from Reggio Emilia, a Garibaldian by vocation and a teacher by fate, who in August 1876 arrived in Tokyo to teach oil painting at the Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō, the art school founded by the Meiji government as part of its ambitious modernization program. He was the first European to do so. Exactly 150 years after his arrival, Turin’s GAM and the Fondazione Torino Musei are