Linda Falcone: The Storyteller of Florence
A Simple Question That Changed Everything
Around 2005, philanthropist Jane Fortune walked into the Florence art world and asked one question: where are the women artists? It was the kind of question that sounds simple until you start looking for the answer. Linda Falcone, who had already spent years working in Florence as manager of The Florentine, an English-language news magazine, joined Fortune in pursuing it. What followed was more than a decade of restoration work, publication, and advocacy that permanently shifted how Florentine museums think about their own collections.
This article, written by ISI Florence student Dahria Charadnichenka based on an interview with Falcone, traces that trajectory from Advancing Women Artists through to the current work of Calliope Arts.
Advancing Women Artists: Fourteen Years of Recovery
Falcone served as a core figure at Advancing Women Artists (AWA) from its founding through its closure in 2020. During that period, AWA funded the restoration of 70 artworks by women housed in Florentine institutions. Falcone also co-authored several books on art restoration with Fortune, including Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence, which documented every artwork by a woman they could locate in the state museum collections. The book became a working reference tool, allowing AWA and the museums themselves to identify which works needed restoration most urgently.
When AWA closed in 2020, Falcone described it as having “lived its natural life.” The organization had raised awareness, sensitized institutions, and pulled works out of storage that had sat unexamined for centuries. But as Falcone noted, there was still a great deal of work left to do.
Calliope Arts: Continuing the Mission
In 2021, former AWA board member Margie MacKinnon and Wayne McArdle founded Calliope Arts, with Falcone as a central collaborator, to continue the work in Florence and London. Since then, Calliope Arts has organized several notable exhibitions, including Women of the Skies in partnership with the Museo Galileo and The Wulz Family Atelier with the Alinari Foundation for Photography.
The most recent project, Girls in the Innocenti Archives, is perhaps the most historically significant. The Innocenti Institute holds approximately 40,000 identity tokens left with abandoned infants over six centuries, many of them girls. These tokens range from half a medallion to scraps of fabric or mixed materials, each left by a family hoping to reclaim their child one day. Alongside the tokens, the Institute maintained detailed records tracking each infant’s life through to adulthood, creating one of the most comprehensive archives of women’s social history in existence.
Storytelling as Conservation
Falcone is clear about her own role in this work: “I’m not a conservation scientist, I’m not a conservator, I am a storyteller.” That framing matters. The curation of an exhibition is not simply the arrangement of objects; it is a series of deliberate decisions about which stories get told and how clearly they can be communicated to a public that may never have encountered them before.
Her observation about museums is worth sitting with: “We have this idea that museums are these dead places, where certain things are on the wall, and that’s that. Well, certain things are on the wall because somebody made a decision about them. Everything is intentional.”
Calliope Arts’ work insists that those decisions should reflect the full range of human contribution, including the women whose work has been overlooked, stored away, or simply never asked about.
