Entitled Ancona Revisited, the exhibition that from April 18 to June 14, 2026 presents at the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona a confrontation between the photographs of Massimo Baldini and the verses of Franco Scataglini. The project, supported by the City of Ancona, proposes a rereading of the city through a dialogue between image and word, accompanied by unpublished writings by Franco Brevini and Marta Paraventi.
The title recalls the idea of return as a tool for investigation. The term Revisited indicates a critical reconsideration of a familiar place. Ancona is taken as a threshold city, a real and inner port, a space that does not immediately offer itself to the gaze but requires time and attention. In this perspective, the exhibition builds a path that interweaves analytical rigor and aesthetic sensibility. Massimo Baldini, born and raised in Ancona, traverses the city as a layered organism. His images avoid spectacular effects and favor a progressive revelation of details: staircases that mark urban space like intervals of a score, architectural fronts marked by time, glimpses in which ancient traces emerge within the modern fabric. The monumentality of the Passetto is measured by the everydayness that takes place at the foot of the shrine; a curve toward the pier, an isolated lantern, the unexpected hue of a quay marked by rust take on the value of discreet signs. The theme of the frontier recurs: the imposing staircase, the road that skirts the harbor and leads toward a departing ship, the oblique line separating city and sea. Each image becomes an opportunity to reflect on an intermediate condition between high and low, open and closed, lived time and imagined time.
Within this framework are the verses of Franco Scataglini, an author born in Ancona in 1930 and who died in Numana in 1994, a central figure in the neo-dialectal season of the 20th century. His dialect deviates little from standard Italian, but it is precisely in this deviation that a precise geographical and existential imprint is concentrated. The relationship between the two authors is based on an aesthetic of subtraction: reduction to the essentials of words and stanzas in the poet, essentiality of framing in the photographer. The exhibition route avoids an illustrative relationship. The photographs do not translate the poetic texts, nor do the verses take the form of captions to the images. The dialogue proceeds by resonances and rejections, by approaches and contradictions. Baldini records the visible datum; Scataglini suggests a further depth. The object identified by the lens finds a possible symbolic horizon in the verses.
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| Ancona Revisited: photos by Massimo Baldini and verses by Franco Scataglini reread the city at the Mole Vanvitelliana |
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