At the PAN in Naples, an exhibition celebrates Muhammad Ali. And a room reconstructs his gymnasium

Boxing champion Muhammad Ali is being celebrated at PAN Naples with a photo exhibition (titled simply Muhammad Ali) chronicling his life and career. On view from March 22 to June 16, 2019, the exhibition, named after the famous boxer, brings together 100 images, sourced from major international photo archives such as New York Post Archives, Sygma Photo Archives, and The Life Images Collection.

“Muhammad Ali,” says Nino Daniele, Councillor for Culture and Tourism of the City of Naples, “is a very important figure who cannot be confined to the sporting discipline in which he excelled and rightly became an unsurpassed myth. His choices cost him much. And he consistently professed the values he claimed to follow. Understanding more deeply the complex story of a character still beloved, in times of racism and violence in the name of religion, is essential. Those who do, will know what a man Muhammad Ali was.”

“There are people,” says editor Giorgio Terruzzi, “who illuminate the air, an entire era, collective memory. They are rare and precious. They are phosphoric and contagious. An extraordinary heritage. To organize an exhibition on Muhammad Ali means, therefore, to illuminate. Photographs as flashes that allow a closeness, a replaying of memory, a jolt to feelings that have been around for decades. Photographs as revelations for those who are younger and have not had the opportunity to measure the full greatness of Muhammad Ali, compared to their own time, to today, to the days to come.”

“’The Greatest!’; ’The King of the World.’ ’ The definitions are famous,” explains Marco Pastonesi, the other curator of the exhibition, “and have become clichés in which we have all come across, under the guise of sports. Because Ali, perhaps the most extraordinary boxer in history, turned sport into a very high trampoline.”

Each room is set up to show the different stages of Ali’s life and the cultural impact this 20th century icon left behind. Another room is set up like a boxing gymnasium, with a ring in the center on which a video is projected with clips of the most famous fights Ali sustained.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Department of Culture and Tourism of the City of Naples, organized by ViDi - Visit Different.
The exhibition is open daily (except Tuesdays) from 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Ticket price: full 10 €, reduced 8 €, schools 5 €.
For all information you can call +39 081.3630018.

Pictured: Miami Beach (1971). Workout in the 5th Street Gym of Chris Dundee, brother of manager Angelo. Photo credit Chris Smith/Getty Images.

At the PAN in Naples, an exhibition celebrates Muhammad Ali. And a room reconstructs his gymnasium

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