Keyword: Italy
More than just a large male marble face near the heart of Rome, the Bocca della Verità is above all a medieval legend about the existence of a statue that would bite the hand of anyone who lied while placing it inside. This 1891 text was written by Ersilia Caetani… Read more »
The tregenda [from a northern Italian dialect: “that which shall be traversed”] refers to gatherings of witches and evil spirits coming together at night to carry out malevolent actions. While belief in these demonic assemblies was widespread across Europe, in the 16th-17th century Friuli, it took a singular form through… Read more »
Overlooking the Sicilian capital, Pizzo Sella is a natural promontory also home to hundreds of unfinished constructions – the result of a wave of illegal urban sprawl started in the late 1970s. Artist Erik Smith freely explores the enduring presence of these concrete ghosts, engaging with the fragments – materials… Read more »
Every February in Southern Italy, the LGBTQ+ community gathers for a religious event at the Sanctuary of Montevergine in Mercogliano, a small village nestled in the hills of Irpinia. The group collectively enters trance-like states which celebrate “Mama”, a local medieval black Madonna who is believed to protect the marginalised…. Read more »
The poetics of a space that might never have been – a lake, that emerged in the city of Rome during the excavations for a shopping mall. Photographer Dario Li Gioi has been visiting this place for years and contemplates how its unique ecosystem today offers a counterbalance to the… Read more »
What role can public art play in constituting the experience of a place? For fifteen years, Mili Romano has curated Heart of Stone, a series of multidisciplinary interventions in the town of Pianoro, in the province of Bologna. Morphologically transformed by redevelopment processes imposed from above, this small village, already… Read more »