ALLE ORIGINI DEL BEL PAESE. L'Italia dell'Ottocento nelle fotografie della Collezione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
27 settembre 2024 - 6 gennaio 2025

The photographic collection of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation was started in 1992 with the purchase of contemporary artists' works, following the direct will of the President, Patrizia Sandretto; in the following years, the Foundation
turned its attention to the past with the aim of creating a historical and scientific itinerary around the development of photographic art in our country.

 

 

Conceived as a classic voyage en Italie, a journey to which, from the mid-nineteenth century, scholars, artists, intellectuals, and nobles from Central and Northern Europe dedicated themselves, the collection today includes thousands of photographic works documenting Italian beauty, customs, and traditions from North to South: a journey encompassing all the main cities of the peninsula, from the Alps to Sicily, from where some travelers continued by ship to Greece and occasionally Egypt.
The Simplon Pass, Brenner, and Nice were the main gateways to the sunny (and healthy) climate that attracted foreigners eager for beauty and history. Art cities and archaeological sites were the main destinations of the so-called Grand Tour,
and photographers, from the early 1840s, gradually replaced engravers in producing images that travelers collected in memory albums of their journeys. Numerous photographic ateliers flourished in cities such as Turin, Milan, Verona, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Siena, Rome, and even Naples and Sicily. Some photographers even managed to open branches in different locations.

 

 

 

The selection of photographs established for the exhibition at the Ugo Da Como Foundation with the curatorship of Filippo Maggia, includes several of the most renowned photographers of the time: Charles Marville in Turin; Adolphe Godard and
Celestino Degoix in Genoa; Hippolyte Deroche, Francesco Heyland and Luigi Sacchi in Milan; Moritz Lotze in Verona; Fortunato Antonio Perini, Domenico Bresolin, Carlo Naya, Carlo Ponti in Venice; Leopoldo Alinari and Alphonse Bernoud in Florence; Robert Macpherson, Giacomo Caneva, Gioacchino Altobelli in Rome; Giorgio Sommer, Robert Rive, Giuseppe Incorpora active between Naples and Sicily, and many more.
Among the exhibited works stands out the album "Turin Ancien et Moderne" of 1867, with big size photographs of Henri Le Lieure, one of the rare existing samples.
Seventy photographs (calotypes, salt prints, albumen prints) not only represent essential documentary research on Italy during the Risorgimento period, but also, through their spontaneity - despite the long exposure times required by the cameras of the period - they convey how pure and untouched the Italian land, with its ancient and priceless landscape and architectural
beauties, appeared to the eyes of transalpine travelers.