Looking and looking again at the telamon of Agrigento, which has created so much stir in the world of archaeologists (much less so in that of architects, and this is no accident), I was reminded of the rhetorical figures of the mundus inversus recoun...
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It all began with a pilgrimage. In the Jubilee year 1500, Battista Graziani, known as Garzadori, traveled to the Holy Land and, having arrived on the banks of the Jordan River, vowed to build a shrine, dedicating it to the saint who baptized Christ i...
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I am asked by "Finestre Sull'Arte" for an opinion on the display at Fiumicino airport of three large panels of the stained-glass window that originally stood at the end of the right aisle of the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. Erratic panels tha...
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The enactment of the "Tarasco" decree(call it by its name) and the almost simultaneous court rulings in Florence have suddenly reawakened the debate on the management of reproductions of public cultural property. Decree and rulings have in fact marke...
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Biennial out of control. Curators have to choose from a given menu, and if that menu is mediocre, the Biennale will be no different. Contemporary art has gone through two crises (2001 and 2009) that have caused it to lose its ability to read the pres...
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Images of cultural heritage are an incredible resource for access to culture and the dissemination of knowledge of Italy's cultural heritage around the world. Although technological development and the spread of digital media have made access to digi...
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Is there really a gulf separating Italy's exhibition offerings from those of countries like France or even the Netherlands? While in Paris hordes of visitors, including Italians, remain enraptured among the rooms of the Rothko exhibition at the Fonda...
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Italy's latest disputes over the commercial use of images of Michelangelo's David (GQ and Brioni cases) and Leonardo'sVitruvian Man (Ravensburger case) emerge judicially at the same time that the reproduction of the image of Botticelli's Venus for th...
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The climate at the Colosseum continues to be "hot" with controversy. In recent weeks, articles have been coming out voicing the discontent of various agencies and tour operators regarding the named ticket introduced at the Colosseum Park as of last O...
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"I had to pay 200 euros to publish in an international magazine some photos of materials from an excavation I directed." "I refused to pay 50 euros for a photo of mine of a piece in a museum, which, moreover, had already been edited. Not because of t...
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Much is being said these days about the completion of the work by which a small part of the colonnade of the Basilica Ulpia that had been lying on the ground for centuries and centuries in the area of the Imperial Fora in Rome and the steps behind it...
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The invitation to intervene in the discussion rekindled by the improper Ministerial Decree 161 proposes some questions, to which it is not easy to give answers in a few pages. Unless we take note that there are problems made unnecessarily complex by ...
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An article appeared these days in the Bolognese newspaper "Il Resto del Carlino" documenting the care devoted as early as the nineteenth century to the thousand-year-old Garisenda Tower, a symbol of the city, which today is said to be in danger of co...
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"Creating sculpture means existing in a place": so said Volterra artist Mauro Staccioli. But of the existence and enchantment of Michelangelo Pistoletto's monumental Venus of rags , installed in Naples' Piazza Municipio last June, little remains toda...
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In 2007, while discussing on his television program Passepartout the facsimile of Veronese's Wedding at Cana that we had made for the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore (the place for which the original was intended and painted as a site-specific work...
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It is logical to expect that a country that thrives on deep contradictions ends up expressing them also in the culture supply sectors, thus in the museum sector. After all, ISTAT tells us that Italy is a country of untapped cultural potential, in whi...
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