The Italian Community of St Louis welcomes two great curators of Italian art to St Louis: Yuri Primarosa of the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica in Rome and Roberto Palermo of the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence. Both curators are in St Louis on behalf of their respective museums for the closing of the St Louis Art Museum's exhibition "Paintings on Stone".

Yuri is a curator at the National Galleries of Ancient Art (Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica) in Rome. His interests focus mainly on the paintings and graphics produced in Rome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to which he has dedicated numerous contributions. He obtained his bachelor's degree in art history at La Sapienza University of Rome, writing his thesis on Karel van Vogelaer and "still life" in Baroque art.

In 2015, he obtained his PhD also from La Sapienza, writing his thesis on Ottavio Leoni. Yuri has published a comprehensive catalogue of Leoni's works for Ugo Bozzi Publishers entitled "Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630), Eccellente miniator di ritratti. Catalogo ragionato dei dipinti e dei disegni (Rome, 2018)". As noted previously, Yuri is also interested in painting and graphics in Rome in the 17th and 18th centuries. He is the author of the essay "Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, 1980", in the publication La riscoperta del Seicento (The Rediscovery of the Seventeenth Century), I libri fondativi, within the first volume of the Quaderni di Ricerca della Fondazione 1563 (Genova, 2017).

In 2015 he was the winner of a Scholarship for Advanced Studies from the 1563 Foundation for Art and Culture, with a project on the figure of Elpidio Benedetti (1609-1690), agent of the French crown in Rome. The research shed new light on the artistic commissioning and intermediary activity of Giulio Mazzarino and Jean-Baptiste Colbert at the Holy See. Through an in-depth documentary survey conducted in the Roman and Parisian archives, Primarosa shed light on a key figure in the Roman scene of the second half of the seventeenth century.

Roberto Palermo is the senior photographer and a curator of art at the Uffizi Museum in Florence which houses works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Raphael. Born in Puglia, Roberto studied at the University of Florence. Since 1999, he has been creating art catalogues for the Uffizi Museum specializing in the professional reproduction of antique pieces of art in the graphic field for exhibition purposes and in the digital scanning of works of art through UV/IR systems for studio usage, research and scientific purposes.