Italy is a wish. Photographs, landscapes and visions 1842-2022. The Alinari and Mufoco collections

The central theme of the photographic exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale is the Italian landscape, whose transformations over time represent a metaphor for the social, artistic and cultural change that has taken place in our country from the mid-nineteenth century until today.

The exhibition offers a wide selection of images - over 600 - from the archives and collections of the Alinari Foundation for Photography and the Mufoco - Museum of Contemporary Photography, which covers a very broad period of time: from the dawn of landscape photography to to the contemporary world. Thanks to a chronological succession of techniques and different languages, the exhibition thus allows us to retrace the evolution of the different ways of representing the Italian landscape and to appreciate its beauty. All the works on display are characterized by a great richness of techniques, materials, formats and methods of presentation: starting with the photographs from the Alinari Archives and continuing with the works from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography. 

The exhibition is enriched by unexpected combinations of works distant in time from each other, ranging from the shooting point to the technique, from the language to the place represented, from the themes addressed to the infinite possible suggestions, references and associations.The itinerary is thus transformed into a sort of journey through Italy: from the almost pictorial photographic views of the Alinari brothers to Luigi Ghirri's "natural shots" from north to south Italy, from Gabriele Basilico's portraits of the Milanese factories to the first backlit negatives, up to the latest research where photography opens up more and more to other media.

Photo credits: courtesy of Scuderie del Quirinale official site