Stefano Lazzari. Tra le mura

Unusual glimpses and hidden details of Porta San Sebastiano and its imposing defensive towers, which are now home to the Museo delle Mura: the two series of paintings by Umbrian artist Stefano Lazzari pay homage to one of Rome's most evocative sites, the largest and best-preserved gate of the Aurelian Walls.

Lazzari has an expertise as a copyist of excellence, having conceived one of the few companies in the world specializing in the reproduction of ancient works of art using original techniques, the Bottega Tifernate, but he is here at his first personal experience. The eight roundels and the polyptych of fourteen elements, in all cases tempera on panel, repurpose new angles of the museum as would a curious tourist attracted to minute details that, extrapolated, manipulated and enlarged, can be used on Instagram or as an unexpected pictorial sequence with a pop flavor.

Along the Walkway, and in the West Tower housing the exhibition space, Lazzari reinterprets in the first case, in the open air, the relationship between the Aurelian Walls and the park behind – a very singular place where the modern city has never arrived – and in the second case, inside the museum, the “skin” of the ancient brick that, in the infinite tamperings of time, itself becomes something organic in the same way as the bark of a centuries-old tree.