150° of the Italian Unity

150th Anniversary of the Italian Unity: the FM at the inauguration of the exhibition Bella Italia at the Reggia La Venaria

Torino  ||  17 March 2011
Iniziative (EN) - 150° of the Italian Unity

“Through the works which adorn the Palace at Venaria we want the visitor to enter into the multifaceted brilliant beauty of the country: an exciting, awe inspiring and emotional voyage, like all voyages in Italy”.

This is the phrase on the panel at the entrance of the exhibition “Bella Italia” with more than 350 artworks from the museums of Italy and the world, as well as private collections, which tell the identity of the main Italian “capitals of culture”.

Turin is the Army, Metallurgy, the Court. Florence is the founder of the language and of the arts with Dante, Giotto, Donatello, Botticelli, Michelangelo. Rome is the glory of classical antiquity and the religious authority: two unifying elements destined to keep together the new Italy. Milan is Leonardo da Vinci, it is the piety of the Borromeo, it is the Enlightenment and the constant and fertile dialogue with Europe. Venice is the great painting of Tiziano and Veronese, the perfume of the orient, the myth of good government and the inimitable city. Genoa, very rich and very beautiful, financial capital in the Europe of the Counter reform and Absolutism, the city which transformed banking profits into Rubens, Van Dyck,  and into the most beautiful buildings in Christendom. Bologna, the second city of the Papal State, is the prestige of its University and the classical ideal which runs from Raffaello to Guido Reni. Parma and Modena are art and the collections of the merchant princes. Naples of the Aragonese and the Bourbons, of San Gennaro, of the street uchins and of Masaniello. Palermo of the Emperor Federico, of feudalism, of rebellious barons, of autonomy continually asserted and continuously contrasted.

President Capasso, together with the Assessor Alfieri, the Coordinator of the exhibition Antonio Paolucci and professor Pierluigi Leone de Castris, curator of the Neapolitan section of the exhibition, visited the splendid nineteenth century galleries of the stables where more than 350 artworks are on display in a scenographic project by Luca Ronconi.

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