Fortepan

Viva l’Italia

by Chiara Ruberti

Location: Palazzo Guinigi, Via Guinigi, 29

Opening days and hours:
Monday – Thursday from 15:00 to 19:00
Friday – Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00


The image of Italy has always oscillated between the stereotype of the Bel Paese and the complexity of the real country, between the myths and ghosts of the past and desires for the future, between stories and History. Vernacular photography can provide an extraordinary contribution to the representation of the landscape and society of Italy over the last one hundred and fifty years. On the one hand, it helps consolidate traditional visual patterns, while on the other, it offers a unique and unrepeatable glimpse into the intimate and collective life of Italians. This selection of images takes advantage of the rich polysemy of vernacular images from the Fortepan Archive, which Photolux is helping to enrich with research in local and national public and private archives. Most of the materials collected so far come from the photographic collections of the Archive of the Province of Lucca and the Diocesan Library of Lucca “Mons. Giuliano Agresti”, as well as private archives and family albums. The exhibition reconstructs an unpublished geography of Italy, where the threads of the distant and recent past are intertwined and places and stories are connected in a narrative freely inspired by Viva l’Italia, one of Francesco De Gregori’s most famous songs. Published in 1979, it tells the story of the feeling that in the singer-songwriter’s perception was sweeping across the country at the time and which still seems alive today, forty-five years later and in its perpetual harmony of contradictions. Widely foreseeable tragedies such as the Vajont dam collapse (1963) and the Viareggio railway disaster (2009); events for which not all the circumstances and responsibilities have yet been clarified such as the Ustica (1990) and Moby Prince (1991) massacres, the disappearance of Davide
Cervia (1990) and countless other news stories, sometimes well known, sometimes forgotten; Mafia-related attacks such as the Christmas massacre on the Rapido 904 (1984) 08 and the Georgofili massacre (1994); up to the events of the G8 in Genoa for which many of those responsible are still
missing. The recent history of Italy is studded with events of which, over time, different, partial and incomplete narratives have been superimposed, and on which it deserves today, with the right distance, to throw a new light able to illuminate even the dark corners.

FORTEPAN
Fortepan Method is a project created in collaboration with the Summa Artium Foundation of Budapest (Hungary) and the Fotofestiwal Lodz (Poland), with the support of the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. The aim of the project is to extend the collections of the Fortepan Archive – born twelve years ago in Budapest (www.fortepan.hu), from the discovery of a plastic bag full of anonymous photographs in a dumpster, and which today has over 175,000 photographs – and create an international platform (www.fortepan.eu) that tells the story of Europe, from the invention of photography to 1990. The story of everyday life, of places and cities, of streets and houses, in the shadow of the great political events that have crossed the last century in an archive accessible to all, where the photographs are available under Creative Commons license and can therefore be viewed, used and printed freely by all users of the platform.