by Redazione 04/11/2026
Categories: Exhibitions / Disclaimer
From November 13 to 15, 2026, the bEB Library at Palazzo Bentivoglio will present *Casa Arcangeli* by Giuseppe De Mattia, a 2013 photography project that was recently added to the institution’s permanent collection. The program also includes a conversation with the artist and two curators.
Twelve photographs document the rooms of the Arcangeli family’s last home in Bologna, revealing traces of a domestic and intellectual history through the marks left on the walls by furniture, books, and works of art. This is the “Casa Arcangeli” project by Giuseppe De Mattia, the focus of the exhibition scheduled for November 13–15, 2026 , at bEB—the library of Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna named after art historian Eugenio Busmanti.
The exhibition brings together twelve images from the series *Strada Maggiore 49 (Casa Arcangeli)*, created by the artist in 2013 and recently added to the permanent collection of the Bolognese institution. The photographs will be on view all three days, from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m. On Saturday, November 14, at 5:30 p.m., the library will also host a conversation with Giuseppe De Mattia, Elena Volpato, curator of the GAM in Turin, and Tommaso Pasquali, curator of Palazzo Bentivoglio. The discussion will focus on the photographic project and its relationship to memory, photography, and the traces of daily life preserved within domestic spaces.
The series stems from the documentation of the rooms in the Arcangeli family’s final residence, located at Strada Maggiore 49, shortly before the apartment’s renovation and after all the furnishings had been removed. The images capture the spaces of a large middle-class home that had been home to art historian Francesco Arcangeli and his siblings: Nino (1905–1965), a musician; Gaetano (1910–1970), a poet; and Bianca, known as Rosalba (1913–2007), a painter.
Stripped of the objects that had characterized their daily life, the rooms retain on their walls the imprints left by furniture, books, and paintings. These marks become a sort of map of the family’s life and of the human and intellectual events that shaped one of the most significant Bolognese households of the 20th century. De Mattia focuses his gaze precisely on what remains after the furnishings have been removed: material traces that bear witness to presences now absent and allow us to reconstruct, at least in part, the history of these spaces.
Photography thus takes on the task of recording what time and the transformations of the spaces threaten to erase. The house is not documented through its furnishings or personal objects, but through the imprints of where they once stood, which become indirect testimonies to family and cultural memory. The series *Strada Maggiore 49 (Casa Arcangeli) * was also published in a limited edition by Danilo Montanari Editore.
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| In Bologna, twelve photographs depict the Arcangeli family’s home before the renovation |
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