Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life

The exhibition at Palazzo Altemps celebrates Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, a district of London where young writers, intellectuals, artists and musicians gathered. These intellectuals experimented with new forms of revolutionary thought with respect to the principles of the Victorian period, still strongly anchored to a conservative mentality.

The exhibition, conceived and curated by the journalist and academic Nadia Fusini, a great connoisseur of the English author, together with Luca Scarlini, writer and playwright, presents books, paintings, photographs and objects of the group's protagonists, linked by intellectual friendship, through the which we can reconstruct the lively artistic-literary flowering of London in the early 1900s. The intellectuals who met in the rooms of the sisters Virginia and Vanessa Stephen shared artistic ideas, political ideals, romantic relationships and dreamed of a fairer society than in the past. Among these we remember, for example, Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, who hoped for a classless society, or John Maynard Keynes, who revolutionized economic thought by laying the foundations of the welfare state, or Lytton Strachey who, in his historical essays, unmasked the hypocrisy and morality of the Victorian era.

The exhibition stems from a project of the National Roman Museum and the Electa publishing house in collaboration with the @NationalPortraitsGallery of London. The catalog, edited by Nadia Fusini and Luca Scarlini, is structured as a sort of an intimate “diary”, a notebook of notes and memories in which the main themes of the exhibition are developed.

Photo credits: courtesy of Palazzo Altemps official site