The exhibition “Impression, Morisot” is the first major exhibition in Italy dedicated to Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) held at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa from 12 October 2024 to 23 February 2025.

Press Preview Thursday 10 October 2024 at 11.30 am. The exhibition is part of the calendar of official celebrations to mark the 150 th anniversary of Impressionism, included in the commemorative season initiated by the Museo d’Orsay in Paris, organised in collaboration with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice and with unpublished works from the heirs of Berthe Morisot.

The exhibition is a project by the Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura and Electa, who is also a publisher of the catalogue, supported by the Liguria Region and Genoa City Council, with the patronage of the French Embassy, and is curated by Marianne Mathieu, one of the most renowned experts on Berthe Morisot’s work and a scholar of the history of Impressionism, and protagonist of many scientific discoveries in this field.

More than 80 works, including paintings, etchings, watercolours and pastels, plus photographic and archive documents, many of which have never been seen before, provide an insight into the life of the artist, who managed to reconcile family life and an artistic career, and entertained fruitful relations not only with the greatest artists of the time such as Renoir, Monet, Manet and Degas, but also with intellectual figures such as Mallarmé and Zola. The exhibition features scientific innovations related to her stays on the Riviera between 1881-1882 and 1888-1889 and the influence of the Mediterranean light on her work.

Milan celebrates Enrico Baj (Milan, 31 October 1924 – Vergiate, 16 June 2003), one of the masters of the Italian and international neo-avant-garde, with a large retrospective as one of the protagonists of the autumn exhibitions, designed to revisit all the themes and subjects of his long and multifaceted career. Baj returns to Palazzo Reale in the Sala delle Cariatidi, exactly one hundred years after his birth and twelve years after the exhibition I Funerali dell’anarchico Pinelli, in the same room, and which, for the first time, will be integrated into an anthological itinerary and in close dialogue with other works by the master.

Promoted by the Comune di Milano-Cultura and produced by Palazzo Reale with Electa, the project is curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj and features almost fifty works spanning a time period from the early 1950s to the dawn of the 2000s, covering the artist’s phases of research and involvement with different movements over time: from the recovery of the Dada movement and Surrealism to the modes of Informal art, from the proximity to the Nordic CoBrA group to the genesis of the Nuclear art movement, which Baj founded in Milan with Sergio Dangelo in 1951. Starting from the gestural abstraction of his beginnings, passing through the birth of his larval anthropomorphic figures and the eruption of the liquefied mountains in the magmatic body of the Generals, the exhibition will touch on the parody of extraterrestrial invasions to arrive at the Meccano army and the animated world of chests of drawers and trumeaus.

His characters, which have entered popular imagination, Dames and Generals, Ultrabodies, Mirrors, Furniture and the monsters of the Apocalypse will animate a carousel of creatures from the surrealist and sci-fi universe of an artist who used irony and the grotesque as a tool to dismantle bourgeois conformism and take a stand against all forms of established power.

His famous aesthetics of trinkets and trimmings, of tassels and shiny buttons like insignia on the truncated chests of his emblazoned soldiers, will be the thread that will stitch together, in sections, the enormous themes of Baj’s poetics, freed from a rigid chronological sequence or genre, with continuous cross-references between art and literature, colours and words, following a sort of script that will suggest a theatrical time and space to the spectator, given even the setting.

It was announced today that the Prix Versailles selection committee has included the two Electa bookshops in the Colosseum on its 2024 List of the World’s Most Beautiful Emporiums.

The Prix Versailles, a world prize for architecture and design, awards contemporary achievements that make an exceptional mark on everyday life. The selection criteria include innovation, creativity, the local heritage and eco-sustainability.

Following this initial selection, the Electa bookshops in the Colosseum will compete for one of three 2024 World Titles (Prix Versailles, Mention Intérieur, Mention Extérieur), which will be announced on 2 December at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

The refurbishment of the Colosseum bookshop in May 2022 is part of an overall plan to modernise the network of four bookshops run by Electa in the Colosseum Archaeological Park. The project covered both the furnishings and graphics as well as the product selection: publishing and merchandising with dual copyrights — Electa and the Colosseum Archaeological Park — to provide the public with tools for orientation and understanding, as well as souvenirs marked by graphical care, quality materials and eco-sustainability of the raw materials and production chain.

The design of the bookshops in the Colosseum Archaeological Park was entrusted to Studio Migliore+Servetto, who developed a new format with Electa.

The different areas of intervention are united by a lightweight design for the furnishings, a selection of very light tones and the transparency of specifically designed micro-perforated sheets. These unifying elements are varied in each bookshop with specific colours (red, yellow) and differing graphics designed by Leonardo Sonnoli Irene Bacchi Studio Sonnoli.

Bookcases are used as an effective display system: they are flexible, capable of accommodating the different room sizes and their specific commercial requirements, and they highlight the richness of the contents and different types of merchandise.

The spaces are conceived as a contemporary Wunderkammer. A repeating module is the ‘frame’, which symbolically works around the merchandise on display. Visitors are surrounded by designer objects, articles bearing the Park brand name, books and products that, through the rhythm of the display and the graphic apparatus denoting the spaces, compose a narrative that arouses curiosity and a desire to learn about the monument and its history.

Milan is celebrating Enrico Baj (Milan, 31 October 1924 – Vergiate, 16 June 2003), a master of the Italian and international neo-avant-garde, with an extensive retrospective that will stand out among exhibitions this autumn, as it is designed to cover all the topics and subjects of his long and multifaceted experience.

Baj returns to Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale exactly a hundred years after his birth and twelve years after the exhibition I Funerali dell’anarchico Pinelli (The Funerals of the Anarchist Pinelli) was held in the same room. For the first time, this exhibition will be integrated in an anthological itinerary and a timely dialogue with other works by the master.

Promoted by the Municipality of Milan – Culture and produced by Palazzo Reale with Electa, the project is curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj and includes nearly fifty works distilled in a time span ranging from the early 1950s to the dawn of 2000. It crosses the artist’s research phases and his adherence to different movements over time: from the revival of Dadaism and Surrealism to the modes of Informal art, from his closeness to the Nordic CoBrA to the genesis of the Nuclear art movement, which Baj founded in Milan with Sergio Dangelo in 1951. Starting from the gestural abstraction of his beginnings, passing through the birth of his larval anthropomorphic figures and the eruption of the liquefied mountains in the magmatic body of the Generals, the exhibition touches on the parody of extraterrestrial invasions, reaching the Meccano army and the animated world of chests of drawers and trumeaux.

His characters that have become part of the common imagination — the Ladies and Generals, the Ultrabodies, the Mirrors, the Furniture and the Monsters of the Apocalypse — will animate a flurry of creatures from the surrealist and sci-fi universe of an artist who made irony and the grotesque a picklock for dismantling bourgeois conformism and taking sides against all forms of consolidated power.

His celebrated aesthetics of trinkets and trimmings, tassels and shiny buttons like insignia on the truncated chests of his emblazoned soldiers, is a thread that stitches together sections of the broadest themes of Baj’s poetics, freed from a rigid chronological sequence or genre classification, with continuous cross-references between art and literature, colours and words, following a sort of script that, also in the setting, suggests a theatrical time and space for observers.

From 16 July to 13 September 2024, in anticipation of the major retrospective at Palazzo Reale, the Museum of Natural History on Corso Venezia will also host a tribute dedicated to by the artist’s engravings and books, in which Enrico Baj classified the natural world with irony and imagination. Under the title Enrico Baj. Zoologia fantastica e altre nature (Fantastic Zoology and Other Natures) will feature 22 panels divided among the Manuale di zoologia fantastica (Manual of Fantastic Zoology), Paradiso perduto (Paradise Lost), the folder I Fiori (The Flowers, with its visionary botany), as well as etchings from the famous De Rerum Natura of 1958, a homage (reinvented) to Lucretius’ Latin poem.

BAJ. BajchezBaj is also in Savona and Albissola Marina.
The unique catalogue published by Electa

To mark the centenary of the Milanese artist’s birth, an exhibition curated by Luca Bochicchio and dedicated to Baj’s ceramic work in all its historical and chronological development opens on 8 October. Entitled BAJ. Baj chez Baj will open at the Ceramics Museum in Savona, with a section also at MuDA – Museo Diffuso Albisola in Albissola Marina, in the exhibition centre and Casa Museo Jorn. The scientific collaboration between Milan and Savona, among curators and institutions, aims to outline two independent yet complementary itineraries paying homage to Baj’s eclectic genius. This is documented in the single catalogue published by Electa, in which the two exhibition itineraries unravel between places, forms, materials and encounters, tracing Baj’s fascinating cosmogony, an epiphany of intelligence and creativity.

Baj will also become a topic in Electa’s A-Z series, an array of monographic titles on eclectic 20th-century figures.

Fondamenta, a foundation for art and cultural education, was created by Electa Editore on the anniversary of its 80^th birthday.

Fondamenta is rooted in Electa’s wealth of experience in projects for publishing, heritage enhancement and creating and organising exhibitions and cultural events.

The name Fondamenta was inspired by the exhibition of the same name that writer Daniele Del Giudice

launched and curated between 1999 and 2003 in Venice, involving some of the world’s leading authors and artists. Fondamenta was the template for many festivals to come: it was the first to promote reading and the powerful discussion on current affairs that it generates; it was the first to bring the public into contact with intellectuals from various backgrounds and disciplines; it was the first to bring such a high level of cultural debate and performance events to the streets.

Fondamenta would like to be a “working framework”, and to work with others. Ours is a very open, very multifaceted idea of art and literature. We cannot take a step forward without taking a step back; we cannot understand the new if we do not see how much of the continuum, of the old, of the past, there is in the new.

These were Del Giudice’s words when he presented the project at the time, which not only still resonate evocatively and powerfully today, but even seem to trace the path to re-embracing the civil value of debating ideas and the arts to try to envision forms of communal happiness.

The intention is for the new Foundation to be animated and driven by the same spirit. To create open and vital opportunities for cultural sharing, celebrating the most virtuous and successful links between high and popular culture, to return to the principles of peaceful coexistence, inclusiveness and creativity that inspired the best of, again to quote Del Giudice, our “western atlas”.

GOALS

“Fondamenta is the culmination of a cultural adventure that has united a group of people who have visited, thought and worked at Electa over the years. From this resounding accord came the idea that formed the vision and helped make the leap. Fondamenta will implement educational and cultural projects for institutions and communities; at the same time it will be a place for experimental and broad thinking to synthesise our cultural heritage, the conflicts and rifts of the present, and the visions of the future”, explained Carlotta Branzanti, Director of the Fondamenta Foundation.

FONDAMENTA WAS CREATED TO:

• Reflect on contemporary visual culture: bringing the history of art and images back to the centre of interpretation of contemporary events and topical and urgent debates;
• Reconnect the arts to “read” our world: rediscovering the sparkling canvas that unites art, history, literature, poetry, music, theatre, cinema, to “really see” reality and promote an interconnected model of reading and multimedia knowledge;

• Create new ways of “reading” the Italian regions and landscape: enlightened and guided by the fundamental experience of Luigi Ghirri’s “Journey in Italy”, who sensed and shared with his “electiv” group the urgent need to transform the view of the Italian landscape through photography and literature, we would like to propose, through discussions with local communities and large centres, respectful and measured models of knowledge and visits to the regions, which are not just “nostalgic” visions and that can embody emerging values;

• Educate people in the arts and their heritage by original and incisive means of expression, matching methods, languages and principles primarily to the desires and demands that young people express;

• Experiment and innovate with the help of quality partners to envision, research and realise new forms of cultural communication on the narrative of the present and the future, and on the much-debated relationship between art, representation and multimedia.

WHAT THE FOUNDATION WILL DO:

• it will organise cultural events and festivals for institutions and local authorities together with quality partners;
• it will support public and private cultural institutions in cultural enhancement and co-design, including through participation in calls for tenders addressed to non-profit organisations and through public-private partnerships;
• it will develop new products and forms of storytelling, including digital, for culture;
• it will design ‘cultural participation’ activities in towns and small centres that reinvent the narratives of small and large stories using the expressions and languages of the arts in the regions.

Fondamenta will also be a place for thought and design, for creating new forms of cultural communication, as well as for experimenting and hybridising disciplines that make up the world of the ‘arts’, which, if they do not mix and interact with the major themes of modern times, risk losing touch with communities and young people.

The launch of the website will be accompanied by the zeroth issue of FM, Fondamenta Magazine, which, like a radio tuned to the conversation between original voices in the Italian cultural landscape, will amplify the debate behind the ‘laboratory’ of Fondamenta projects.

In the first episode, there will be original contributions by Chiara Alessi, Gabriele Pedullà, Vanessa Roghi, Silvia Bencivelli and Giulia Cavaliere focused on certain ‘frequencies’ – key to laying the foundations for future projects.

WHO WE ARE

The chairship is entrusted to Rosanna Cappelli, Managing Director of Electa Editore. The Foundation will be directed by Carlotta Branzanti.

In addition to the Chair, the Board of Directors will be comprised of Annapaola Negri-Clementi, Ernesto Franco, Guido Guerzoni and Enrico Selva.

Collaborating in the development of Fondamenta’s projects are professionals and companies that have gained in-depth design skills, experience and relationships in museum, publishing, educational, communication and cultural promotion settings and come from different disciplines – from visual arts to literature, from architecture to graphic design, from art history and criticism to economics, journalism and digital communication.

Electa will be present at the 60^th International Art Exhibition with dedicated publishing offers and updated layouts for its bookshops at the Venice Biennale.

At the bookshop: selected spaces, objects and books

The bookshop at the Arsenale Corderie (project by Migliore + Servetto Architects, 2022), also coordinated with the bookshop at the Giardini della Biennale, will have a new identity thanks to the graphic project by the Sonnoli studio to enhance the Biennale’s historical posters, drawn from the Biennale Library – ASAC.
In the same spaces, Electa will be presenting six official merchandising lines, including institutional ones curated by Studio De Valence and Marco Camuffo, plus the line of novelties designed for this edition by the Brazilian studio Campo.

Maintaining a focus on reading, Electa has also worked on an ‘author’s’ selection of titles. In fact, part of the titles at the bookshops were entrusted to an external ‘search’, presenting an unprecedented slant on the many themes of contemporary culture suggested by the exhibition. Anna Toscano, a writer, photographer and journalist who teaches Italian at Ca’ Foscari and other universities, seized the challenge to cross the threads connected with Adriano Pedrosa’s Biennale Arte 2024, developing a selection of around 300 titles in Italian and English, ranging from novels to essays to poetry.
Philosophical books, anthropological essays, comic books, photobooks, anthologies and short stories were identified and listed under four keywords, four suggestions that run through their contents and trace their trajectory.

Geography, with themes related in different ways and forms to migration, decolonisation, travelling and movement, and thus to people, bodies, language and anthropology;
Language, with titles that explore language in the broadest sense of the term;
People incorporates the concept of individuals and collectivity and traces a path through identity, gender, bodies, activism, migration, ideas, feminism, anthropology, philosophy and decolonisation;
Venice is a tribute that includes texts for leaving the stereotypical image of the Lagoon and entering an awareness of what the city of the Biennale has been, what it is and what it can become.

The four themes, however, intentionally represent a non-categorical selection, in which the boundary between topics can be ‘disputed’ and a book can find a place in the ‘word’ next to it. As with genres, this bibliography is in fact designed to elide or shift the boundary between literary genres: poetry sometimes tends to prose and prose to non-fiction, which can also cross over into poetry or philosophy. There are no limits to this division. Indeed it is a sharing of words without borders, because “when we all recognise ourselves as foreigners”, as Julia Kristeva writes, borders no longer have any reason to exist.

The range of books is completed with the catalogues of the Pavilions and Country Participations, illustrated volumes on the artists present in the International Exhibition, new publications on art/photography/fashion/graphic design, art commentary and focuses on refugee artists and writers.

The Electa catalogues for the Art Biennale 2024

For the 60^th Venice Biennale, Electa is publishing Due qui/To Hear, the guide to the Italian Pavilion, edited by Luca Cerizza and designed by Studio Folder, presenting the project by Massimo Bartolini in collaboration with Caterina Barbieri, Gavin Bryars and Kali Malone.

Among other Electa publications for the 60^th International Art Exhibition, we would like to mention the catalogue of the Saudi Arabian National Pavilion, curated by Maya El Khalil and Jessica Cerasi, where Manal Aldowayanis exhibiting the work Shifting Sands: A Battle Song, and the book H2O Venezia: Diari d’Acqua – Water Diaries, curated by Mara Hofmann, the catalogue of a collective exhibition resulting from a residency programme for women artists who worked on a visual narrative about Venice.

Parallel to the 60th Venice Biennale, the exhibition Uzbekistan: Avant-Garde in the Desert. The Form and the Symbol, curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri and promoted and supported by the Foundation for the Development of Art and Culture of Uzbekistan, is opening at Ca’ Foscari University. This exhibition introduces the Italian and international public to a little-known page of artistic history in the first half of the 20th century. It presents over 100 works from the Tashkent Museum and the Nukus Museum, long described as the ‘Louvre of the Desert’, highlighting the connection between the Russian Avant-Garde and Central Asian art. Electa Catologue (Italian and English editions).

Also available at Electa bookshops is the Guide to the Pavilions of the Venice Biennale since 1877, in Italian and English editions, edited by Marco Mulazzani.

The major exhibition dedicated to Italo Calvino (Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba 1923 – Siena 1985) was presented as a preview to the press and the public at the 35th edition of the Turin International Book Fair. The exhibition will open in Rome at the Scuderie del Quirinale in October 2023. Curated by Mario Barenghi, organised by Ales S.p.A./Scuderie del Quirinale in collaboration with the Electa publishing house, it is among the main events of the official program celebrating the centenary of the writer’s birth.

It is a ‘visual’ project, covering Calvino’s character and work, which will address both his admiring public and ‘new’ readers and young people, who are only now coming to his works. Particular attention will be paid to Calvino’s relationship with the arts, which curator Mario Barenghi and Marco Belpoliti spoke of today in a discussion planned for the Fair, introduced by Rosanna Cappelli, CEO of Electa and Matteo Lafranconi, the Scuderie Director.

The exhibition will be a journey through the life, the choices, the political and civil involvement, the places and above all the literary output and the working method of the writer that will run through the history across ten sections on the two floors of the Scuderie del Quirinale.

The Scuderie del Quirinale, together with Electa, are also once again collaborating with the Liguria Region, the city of Genoa and the Palazzo Ducale Foundation to celebrate Calvino’s centenary, the year that Genoa is Italy’s Book Capital. In October, the city and the Palazzo Ducale will pay tribute to Calvino, starting a site-specific project on the theme of fairy tales and the countryside, which will end in the spring of 2024 when the Roman exhibition travels to Genoa.

Electa will publish a guidebook for the exhibition designed by Studio Sonnoli and edited by Mario Barenghi, as well as a volume of the encyclopaedia series entitled Calvino A-Z, with numerous articles assigned to major specialists and the whole work curated by Marco Belpoliti, who has recently edited for Mondadori Italo Calvino. Take a look.

The Museo del Novecento museum and Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace, together with Liberty and our publishing house Electa, present the FuturLiberty Exhibition from April 5, 2023.

The exhibition, under the scientific curatorship of Ester Coen and artistic direction of Federico Forquet for the fabrics, delves into the history of the futurist movement in an unprecedented way, through a selection of paintings and applied arts exposed in the two seats of the Modern and Contemporary Art Museums of the Municipality of Milan. The works of the futurist movement’s protagonists, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Fortunato Depero are harmoniously combined with the Vorticist paintings of contemporary English artists, such as Percy Wyndham Lewis and Christopher Nevinson, starting from the “Vital English Art” manifesto of 1914, signed by Europe’s avant-gardist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. These artists in turn represented the source of inspiration that guided Federico Forquet and Liberty’s design team in the creation of two new collections.

The inspiring avant-gardes of Futurism and Vorticism express the transition from past practices through a sharp outlook towards the future, by influencing the culture expressed in traditions and in all forms of everyday routines. Strength, energy and dynamism all reflect the vitality of the forms that boosted the creativity of Liberty’s designers throughout the different eras.
Art life, leisure and identities are recombined into a futurist aesthetic, into a vision aimed at reshaping principles and traditions.

The project includes over 200 works in 2 seats. At the Museo del Novecento museum, the exhibition is focused on the interdisciplinarity of avant-garde movements. This unprecedented and fascinating journey is divided into 8 sections, varying from Futurism and Vorticism with essential works of the Museo del Novecento museum’s collection, of which 15 created by renowned authors such as Boccioni, Balla, Severini and Carrà, and others borrowed from prestigious Italian and international institutions, among which the MART of Rovereto, GAM of Turin, Banca d’Italia, Tate, British Council, Estorick Collection, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, William Morris Gallery of London, Sainsbury Centre of Norwich; all there to be compared to the designs of the Liberty collections.

Moreover, images of Milan’s stylish buildings will be projected to further appreciate its Liberty-style architectures. This journey combines architecture and decorations with the designs of the prestigious London archive, thus highlighting the stylistic influence of floral and geometric patterns to reveal a close connection between these two cities.

In the Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace, the focus is instead oriented towards the extraordinary creativity which characterises Liberty’s story and its past and present designers. For the first time since the V&A of 1975, which celebrated its centenary, the paintings, drawings, tapestries, fabrics, clothes, furnishings, photographs and a wide selection of unpublished materials from the Liberty archive will be exhibited in 8 rooms, starting with a section dedicated to its partnership with William Morris.
The exhibition reveals the influences that most affected both the careers of some great masters, among which William Morris, Bernard Nevill and Federico Forquet, and the ideas that redesigned the future throughout the eras by glancing back at the past. The fabric connects the beginning and end of a journey through shapes, colours, patterns and refractions of light.

A guide of the Museo del Novecento museum and Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace leads visitors through this artistic journey, organized by Electa and curated by Ester Coen.

The Museo del Novecento museum houses the largest collection of works from the futurist movement, also thanks to the recent loan of some precious masterpieces of Boccioni, Balla, Severini, among others, from the Gianni Mattioli collection. The futurist gallery offers visitors a one of a kind opportunity to get acquainted with the most renowned Italian artistic movements worldwide, right in Milan, where the main historical events of this movement unwound. The exhibition, dedicated to the connection between Futurism and English Vorticism, thus finds its ideal seat at the Milanese institution.

The Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace: has the task of presenting, preserving and producing evidence of the changes that Milan embraced. The Art Gallery houses paintings, drawings and sculptures representative of the historic, urban and social evolution of the Milanese capital. Milan’s custom and fashion collection is exhibited alternately according to thematic exhibitions and continuously allows to reflect on the interdisciplinarity of decorative arts and design. This is the perfect setting for taking part in Futurliberty, whose focus is dedicated to the study of the connection between art and fashion through the works of great masters of Futurism and Vorticism.

Liberty is the avant-gardist of design and decorative arts since 1875. It is internationally renowned for its fabrics, in particular for its floral patterns, but also for a long history of experiments with bold geometric designs reminiscent of the shapes and colours of the early 20th-century’s avant-garde art, in particular of those created by Italian futurists and English Vorticists. The extraordinary archive of over 50.000 drawings and prints from the beginning to present day is a constant source of inspiration. For Liberty’s 150 years, the esteemed interior couturier and designer Federico Forquet has curated a striking new range of fabrics – the FuturLiberty collection – aimed at bringing Liberty’s creative legacy into our era. The collections are produced in the northern Italian plant, in Lombardy, using both innovative digital technologies and century-old techniques.

Electa presents Oilà, the new series, edited by Chiara Alessi, that tells the stories of twentieth-century female figures who distinguished themselves in the Italian and international creative setting (from design to fashion, architecture to music, illustrations to graphics, photography to literature) by practising disciplines and professions that had always been considered part of the male universe. The graphics are developed by Studio Sonnoli.

The first three titles, which will be simultaneously released on March 8, are dedicated to Elsa Schiaparelli, Lisetta Carmi and Vanessa Bell: three protagonists, three characters, three stories, three individuals stories that transformed the way of interpreting art, design, photography and fashion and that contributed to the social and artistic emancipation of women. The stories take place in the midst of wars, displacements and social revolutions, in a world, or profession, not considered suitable for women.

The books

The books, intended to be read aloud from beginning to end in forty-five minutes – a short journey –  detail the stories of people’s biographies, jobs, private situations and public achievements. Small in format, with a defined layout and special cover for each individual title, the texts were entrusted to scholars, experts, writers and professionals. Each series begins with a story or anecdote on the life and profession of these women, digging into their childhood, family or sentimental relationships, based on the correspondence and diaries preserved in the archives, or on unpublished and unknown projects, to free women from preconceptions only aimed as seeing them as daughters, wives or sisters (such as Vanessa for Virginia Woolf).

And so, the series, or collection, of monographic readings based on the characters’ personal stories was created in the form of notebooks.

The title

The playful title of the series, Oilà, was taken from the famous verses of the socialist song La Lega [The League], which then became part of common italian women workers’ life. “Although we’re women, we’re not afraid, we have beautiful and nice mouths to defend ourselves. A oilì oilì oilà and our league will grow.”

Oilà is also a way to greet someone unexpected, the sound of someone caught by surprise. This series represents the voice and work of women.

Rossella Locatelli

The future, whatever it may hold. Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli’s circumstances seem like an ongoing struggle in the name of small freedoms. Alongside other women sharing this feeling. Fashion comes from instinct, revenge, necessity. Hers is a quick and absolutely spontaneous revolution. Although ironical or cruel at times, Schiap’s vision of fashion is closely linked to women’s obsessions and manias, or to a profound desire of independence. And… She is never alone in her fury.

Anna Toscano

With love and friendship. Lisetta Carmi

The hands, eyes and heart. Initially, Lisetta Carmi’s fingers run up and down the black and white keys of a piano, her eyes follow the keyboard from left to right, and her heart beats to the rhythm of a well-tempered harpsichord. Then, Lisetta Carmi’s fingers record and write the life of others through pictures. Pictures of people, streets, harbours, theatres, hospitals and cemeteries. Pictures of death and sex: of humanity Eyes and hearts to help her understand both others and herself. With love and friendship.

Luca Scarlini

Life is terrible and fun. Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell is always available for others: her husband, Clive Bell, despite his betrayals and critical mindset towards the artist’s life; Duncan Grant, the love of her life and colleague, who is however attracted by men; Omega Worshop, which according to its founder and financier, Roger Fry, wants to suppress the cult personality of her representatives; her sister, Virginia Woolf, through whom her work as an artist, graphic designer, decorator and illustrator is always interpreted. Vanessa Bell is there for others, those close to her have never jeopardised her art, on the contrary, they’ve fed it.

From 26 October to 12 February 2023, the exhibition “Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life” will be at the National Roman Museum in Rome.

For the first time in Italy, Palazzo Altemps presents an exhibition celebrating the spirit of Bloomsbury, the London district where new forms of life and thought, which transformed the Victorian principles and strong patriarchal spirit with which the twentieth century was still imbued, were developed. After the death of their widowed father in 1904, Virginia Stephen, later Woolf, and her siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian moved from the affluent district of Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury. Starting in 1905, a large group of young men and women would meet in the house in 46 Gordon Square to invent a new, free life.

Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life is a project of the National Roman Museum and the Electa publishing house, developed in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery of London. The exhibition highlights the original soul of Palazzo Altemps, an aristocratic mansion in the heart of Rome.

Conceived and curated by Nadia Fusini – a connoisseur of the British author who edited the two volumes in the Meridiani series – in cooperation with Luca Scarlini – writer, playwright, storyteller, performance artist – the exhibition examines the complex intellectual friendships of the Bloomsbury group through books, words, paintings, photographs and the possessions of the protagonists of this adventure in art and thought.

The story of the members of the Bloomsbury circle unfolds in five rooms of Palazzo Altemps. The young intellectuals who met in the home of the Stephen sisters shared artistic predilections, romantic relationships, innovative creative experiences, social thinking. Individuals with strong personalities, they would become left-wing economists, historians, writers, thinkers and painters, and, often, very famous. They dreamed, like Leonard Woolf, of a classless society or, like Virginia, of a world without ivory towers for its artists; John Maynard Keynes revolutionised economic thought and laid the foundation for the welfare state, and for state support of the arts; Lytton Strachey invented a new form of biographical writing, while critic and painter Roger Fry established a different way of looking at and creating works of art. In addition to the undisputed value of equality, economic equality first and foremost, another essential principle for the group was the recognition of the singularity of each individual.

It is no coincidence that the exhibition is housed in Palazzo Altemps, previously home to a prestigious library – built up between the end of the XVI and the XVII centuries by Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps and his nephew Giovanni Angelo, and later merged with the Vatican Apostolic Library – and, in the nineteenth century, to distinguished literary salons. It was here, in the Church of St. Aniceto, built within the fabric of the palazzo, that in 1883 Gabriele D’Annunzio married Maria Hardouin di Gallese, a daughter of the last family to live in Palazzo Altemps.

Edited by Nadia Fusini and Luca Scarlini, the exhibition catalogue published by Electa is organised as a personal dairy, a collection of notes and memories, a visual story including essays by distinguished authors, which examines the key themes of the exhibition: the protagonists, their houses, their romantic relationships, their literature, their relations with the arts and publishing, to build up a portrait of one of the most important cultural groups of the twentieth century.

The National Roman Museum with the Electa publishing house and the support of the Italian Virginia Woolf Society have organised a wide-ranging program of events linked to the themes examined by “Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life” will be at the National Roman Museum in Rome. Nadia Fusini and Luca Scarlini will meet the public on a series of occasions to talk in depth about and celebrate the fascinating story of the Bloomsbury group.

The exhibition will be open until 12 February 2023. For information about times and tickets:

museonazionaleromano.beniculturali.it/palazzo-altemps