From June 29, 2025 to March 2026, the Vittoriale degli Italiani, in the halls of Villa Mirabella, inside the Park, will host E la nave va, the first solo exhibition in Italy of Dante Ferretti (Macerata, Italy, 1943), the celebrated, internationally awarded set and costume designer. The exhibition pays tribute to an excellence in world cinema, who over the course of a nearly 70-year career has worked with such masters as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, Franco Zeffirelli, Ettore Scola and Luigi Comencini.
Ferretti, winner of three Academy Awards for the sets for Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and Hugo Cabret and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, as well as four David di Donatello and ten Nastri d’Argento, counts an exhibition at MoMA in New York and others in Los Angeles. Yet, until now, no Italian institution had ever celebrated his extraordinary artistic contribution with a solo show.
The exhibition, produced in collaboration with Il Cigno Arte and curated by Giordano Bruno Guerri and Pietro Di Natale, displays chalk, charcoal and collage sketches, from Pasolini’s Uccellacci e uccellini to Fellini’s E la nave va. A visual journey that restores the essence of his art, in which imagination takes shape through matter.
The initiative is part of GARDA - Un lago in festa, a preview of the new cultural festival that, starting in 2026, will unite the main municipalities of the three shores of Lake Garda in a shared cultural network. Fruit of the evolution of GardaLo! - a project created in 2021 to enhance the Lombard shore of the lake - the festival is promoted by three significant entities for Garda culture: the Vittoriale degli Italiani, the Garda Community and GardaMusei, engaged in a strategic synergy that aims to transform the lake into a widespread and permanent cultural stage.
The exhibition will involve the entire Vittoriale in a later expanded version.
“Ferretti experienced with Pasolini, Fellini, Scorsese, Burton, De Palma, Cavani and many other masters the creation of masterpieces that have a historical echo right at the Vittoriale. How can one miss the dialogue between E la nave va and Nave Puglia? The Age of Innocence runs through the halls of the Priory with the same elegance of sets and costumes as Scorsese’s masterpiece. ”I invent the environments as if I lived or was born in that period,“ he said of himself. Now this exhibition takes Ferretti into d’Annunzio’s 1920s and 1930s. I like to think that from the encounter, in his whimsical mind, other images of intense beauty will be born,” said Vittoriale degli Italiani President Giordano Bruno Guerri and curator of the exhibition.
“The more than 20 sketches in the exhibition reproduce places that first exist in Ferretti’s mind and manifest themselves, after a long gestation, in the film,” explained Pietro Di Natale, curator of the exhibition together with Giordano Bruno Guerri. “Be it an interior or a landscape, the author restores with great effectiveness the depth of field and the naturalness of the effects of light and shadow, thus making, already on paper, the setting believable and evocative. Defined by a strongly evocative style, these illustrations highlight an absolute mastery of drawing on the part of Ferretti, who says, ”It’s my life, it always has been. I drew,“ he continues, ”so much that I had to operate on my shoulder [...] Every time my hand moves on the paper I go into a trance, unknown doors open inside my consciousness and a mysterious way connects those signs to the cave of my imagination. I love to reason in images. Drawing is a vital function that helps me to think, to communicate, to understand. To remember."
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| At Vittoriale degli Italiani the first solo exhibition in Italy of Dante Ferretti, three-time Oscar winner |
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