‘Italy is a desire’, the Alinari and Mufoco Collections on the Scuderie del Quirinale

The Scuderie del Quirinale present ‘Italy is a desire. Photographs, Landscapes and Visions (1842-2022). The Alinari and Mufoco’ Collections, taking up the culture of dedicating an crucial exhibition to pictures: a brand new essential exhibition, from June 1st to September 3rd, in Rome, organized with the Alinari Foundation for Photography and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Born from the choice to make our usa’s photographic historical past recognized to the general public via a journey in the public collections of the Alinari Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the exhibition intends to enhance both ancient and contemporary pictures thru a story of the representation of the Italian landscape, over the direction of virtually two centuries (from the mid-nineteenth century to the cutting-edge, ed) underlining its adjustments in addition to the numerous and different points of view. A massive time frame which additionally coincides with the very records of the “terrific invention”, from its beginnings to the modern-day.

At the center of the exhibition, therefore, the landscape, understood as an identifying detail of Italian culture in addition to a privileged difficulty of 19th-century inventive experimentation, both in portray and in pictures. Landscape that over the last fifty years returns to play a valuable role in Italian photography, giving existence to a real faculty, recognized across the world.

The exhibition gives a diffusion of over six hundred works which, further to permitting the general public to find out and appreciate an outstanding type of materials and techniques, will lead the latter thru an excursus of the evolution of the strategies of representation of the ‘Bel Paese’, appreciating one splendor that has long proposed it as a model for the West however additionally grappling with its contradictions.

Structured in step with a chronological itinerary, the exhibition gives on the primary ground of the Scuderie del Quirinale the photographs belonging to the Alinari Archives and on the second floor, in continuity, the works from the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography. The gaze of the photographers of the nineteenth and first half of of the twentieth century, whose works are saved inside the Alinari Archives, a veritable reservoir of visual memories, is represented inside the exhibition by a specially huge choice amongst which the exceptional panoramas of Rome and Florence stand out by Michele Petagna and Leopoldo Alinari.

The visual narrative proceeds with the narration of the myth of the adventure to Italy, the root of Western civilization, via the presentation of numerous works of the origins, with authors such as Girault de Prangey, Calvert Richard Jones, Frédéric Flachéron, Giacomo Caneva.

An insight into the research and continuous experimentation of photography between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is offered in the section committed to negatives and the primary attempts to repair Italy in colour, with authors together with the scientist Giorgio Roster and with rare pieces consisting of the autochromes.

The itinerary keeps with the show of pics by using authors interested in asserting images as an artistic tool and in providing a subjective representation of the arena, which include Vittorio Alinari and Wilhelm von Gloeden. A final trade of pace is represented with the aid of the selection on photography among the forties and fifties of the 20 th century, with the works of Vincenzo Balocchi and Luciano Ferri, Alberto Lattuada, and Fosco Maraini whose pics spotlight the photographer’s love for mountains and the landscape of southern Italy characterised through a unique anthropological imaginative and prescient.

On the second one ground, the works of a number of the most important authors of Italian and international pictures from the put up-conflict length to these days, in a succession of strategies, languages ​​and creative practices, will accompany the tourist up to the most current research, thanks to the works from the collections of the Museum of Photography Contemporary wherein the panorama, and the declinations it assumes, play a essential position.

From the panorama as a scenario of the social and political narration that characterizes the season of reportage (Letizia Battaglia, Carla Cerati, Uliano Lucas, Federico Patellani) we arrive, through the conceptual experiments of the seventies (Mario Cresci, Franco Fontana, Mario Giacomelli), to one of the flagships of this phase, the experience of ‘Viaggio in Italia’, in which Luigi Ghirri collects a series of researches that turn their gaze in the direction of often marginal, normal and anti-wonderful locations and which turn out to be the manifesto of a brand new Italian pictures (Gabriele Basilico, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Guido Guidi).

In the tension between the story of locations and the cultured experience, images reaches the brand new millennium with fantastic large-scale prints and new languages ​​(Paola De Pietri, Fischli and Weiss, Francesco Jodice, Massimo Vitali, Thomas Struth), to the factor of increasing the idea itself of documentation and – within the studies of younger authors – beginning up to objects, practices and technology traditional of the modern-day visible and inventive universe.

“The protection of the landscape is a founding cost of our identification, as well as one of the cardinal principles on which the action of the Ministry of Culture is based totally – declared Lucia Borgonzoni, Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Culture – The panorama evolves and contains the feel of human presence, bearing the traces of 1000-yr-antique history: a valuable casket, which preserves our ancient memory and which, as such, must be treated with care.We were forerunners in this too: Italy is in truth the primary u . S . Within the international to having placed the protection of the panorama many of the priorities of the country.In a moment like this, it's miles vital to apprehend oneself in an identity of places and in an superb u . S . In each corner, as emerges from the photographs on display: this will help us to be custodians aware about a useful legacy, able to welcoming now not handiest the past, however additionally the future”.

“The Scuderie del Quirinale are taking over the culture of imparting to the general public additionally themes and recommendations belonging to the expressive records of pictures – added Mario De Simoni, President of the Scuderie del Quirinale – And they do so via a specifically formidable exhibition, which offers with a theme of such vastness as to be decisive for any view of Italy and so applicable as to be the challenge of what President Ciampi described as the maximum unique article of our Constitution, Art. Nine, which locations the protection of the panorama and of the historical-artistic background a number of the ‘essential standards’. The exhibition Italy is a desire tells in a significant time period, which is going from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, how the Italian panorama has been represented by means of the attention of photographers. The task become conceived, for the Stables and with the Stables, through two of the main Italian public establishments within the photographic field, the Alinari Foundation for Photography and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, which we thank for their ardour, generosity and extravagant knowledge in developing the agency”.

“‘Italy is a preference’ is an exhibition of top notch price which confirms yet again, if it have been wished, that photography is an artwork that knows how to prepare the subjective gaze and the ability to relate a country and an era – concluded Eugenio Giani, President of the Tuscany Region – It additionally applies to panorama pictures, which rightly recollects the words of a poet like Andrea Zanzotto: ‘We are the ones who create the landscape’.And this is real both for the panorama and for its representation in art. The exhibition that opens on the Scuderie del Quirinale is a incredible journey through Italy represented thru time. And for me and for Tuscany it is a source of exquisite delight that an important component is made from snap shots from Alinari information, pics capable of interacting nicely with the works of the Museum of Contemporary Photography.This exhibition too, with its fee, demonstrates the goodness of the selection made in 2020 by using the Tuscany Region, with the advent of the Alinari Foundation for Photography, aimed toward shield an splendid historical past of documentation and photographic artwork, with a group of around five million works”.