Gagosian’s Rome branch opened in December 2007 in a former bank building located minutes from the Spanish Steps. It has Corinthian columns and a stunning oval exhibition space floored not with concrete — too Chelsea — but pietra serena, the sandstone Michelangelo favored. The dealer’s move seems to be vindicated. The inaugural show, of Twombly, sold out three days after it opened. The gallery has on its roster four contemporary Italian artists, including the media darling Vezzoli, who mixes Hollywood glitz and needlepoint and whose most recent project, Greed, a video and embroidered-portrait launch of an imaginary perfume of the same name, is on view through March 21.

Another non-Italian, the Irishman Lorcan O’Neill, has run a contemporary gallery in Rome for the past six years, selling foreign artists alongside domestic ones. He asserts that if prices for Italian artists in recent decades have lagged behind those for their peers in other countries, it’s not for lack of talent. For some viewers, "it’s hard to look at Italian artists and not have a sense of the layering of culture behind them," he explains. "Perhaps that’s intimidating, but there’s a sense that one has to be more sensitive to the rest of culture than one’s ready to be." For example, Luigi Ontani, whom O’Neill represents, has been on the scene for four decades, incorporating his own image into representations of iconic figures, from Saint Sebastian to Dante Alighieri. But although he enjoys a cult following among artists — including Julian Schnabel, who recently acquired a work — wider acclaim has eluded him.

As for longtime Italian dealers, they don’t see the arrival of foreigners on their turf as a threat so much as a vote of confidence. "I hope that Gagosian is going to be a colleague who can contribute to increasing the knowledge and, consequently, the appreciation of Italian art abroad," says Massimo Di Carlo (not to be confused with the Milan dealer Massimo de Carlo), the director of the Galleria dello Scudo, in Verona, since 1972. "The presence of foreign galleries confirms international interest in Italian art." On the other hand, Di Carlo adds, "Pinault represents the questionable figure of an owner of an auction house — Christie’s — engaged in proposing and selling artists that he usually presents in his own collection at the Palazzo Grassi, in Venice. It’s my opinion that he doesn’t support Italian art."

Currently on view at the Palazzo Grassi is "Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution 1968-2008," a survey of 250-plus works — some belonging to Pinault — that opened last September and is on view through March 22. Coproduced by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, where it will take up residence this summer, "Italics" was organized by Francesco Bonami, a well-known and provocative Italian-born curator who has lived in the United States for over two decades (he was recently named a co-curator of the next Whitney Biennial of American Art). Conceiving the Venice show as an alternative to the official critical version of recent Italian art, he packed it with more than one hundred artists, mixing celebrated talents with lesser names. Among the former are Fontana, Burri and most of the big guns from the Arte Povera movement — Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone — who experimented with natural, often inexpensive materials, plus a smattering of painters from the Neo-Expressionist Transavanguardia movement, such as Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, and recent stars like Cattelan, whose disturbing installation All, 2008 — nine corpses laid under white sheets, sculpted from Carrara marble — dominates the entrance of the palazzo. Younger artists represented include Vezzoli and Cuoghi as well as the Genoa-born Vanessa Beecroft, with her visual diary of eating disorders; Monica Bonvicini, whose 1997 video Hausfrau Swinging depicts a woman smacking her head, covered by a dollhouse, against a wall; and Patrick Tuttofuoco, with a room-size neon skyscraper city.

The show has received much negative press. Controversy is as fundamental to the Italian diet as pasta, but even Bonami appears taken aback by the harsh reaction. The critic and curator Germano Celant, the father of Italian postwar art who coined the term Arte Povera, wrote in L’Espresso magazine that Bonami acted like a private collector, choosing minor works based on his personal taste and then "furnishing" the palazzo like a bourgeois home. To many international critics, the show’s inclusions are just as striking as its omissions. Some of the snubbed are internationally recognized names of whom Bonami is not a fan: Mimmo Paladino, a prominent Transavanguardia artist who incorporates mythology and symbolism into his work, for instance, and Nicola De Maria, whose vividly colored abstract paintings are often applied directly to walls. A few artists or their estates refused to take part. An American collector loaned the Burri work after the artist’s estate declined to contribute. Other rejections came from Fausto Melotti’s heirs and from the Rome-based Jannis Kounellis. Of the former, Bonami retorts, "he’s a good artist, but not a cornerstone of Italian art," and as for Kounellis, the curator says "in two weeks the public won’t notice he’s not there."