From Feb. 27 to June 30, 2026, the Venice Foundation, in its new venue at Palazzo Flangini, presents the exhibition Gianni Berengo Gardin. The Venice of the Master of Black and White, curated by Denis Curti and promoted by the Venice Foundation in collaboration with Le Stanze della Fotografia Foundation. Visitable free of charge, the exhibition celebrates the work of Gianni Berengo Gardin, linked to the institution by a relationship of deep artistic understanding, culminating in 2021 with the donation of thirty-six black-and-white photographs belonging to the project La più gioconda veduta del mondo, now an integral part of the permanent collection.
The fulcrum of the itinerary, consisting of thirty-four Venetian images, is a nucleus of hitherto unpublished shots, born of a singular biographical and literary coincidence. As a guest of his friend Renato Padoan at Palazzo Bollani, Berengo Gardin discovered that Pietro Aretino, who described the passage along the Grand Canal in 1537, had lived in those rooms. Looking out the same window, the photographer chose to observe what the man of letters had contemplated centuries earlier, almost guided by his ideal presence in choosing the shots and gestures to capture.
The works thus relate two gazes distant in time but united by the same fascination with what opens beyond that window: the architecture remains unchanged, while the means and habits of daily life change. Motorboats replace rowboats, images of the Historical Regatta, weddings, the Pescheria and the Rialto Bridge when it was still made of wood flow by. Each photograph becomes a fragment of memory that dialogues with the Renaissance voice, returning an image of Venice that is alive and layered, still capable of surprising those who know how to observe it. What emerges is the essence of a city that continues to tell of trades, faces and beauty.
Six months after Berengo Gardin’s death, the exhibition aims to pay tribute to one of the great protagonists of 20th-century Italian photography, emphasizing his civil as well as aesthetic commitment. The celebrated photographer was able to represent Venice in its actuality, with its contradictions and fragility, avoiding the easy rhetoric of postcard beauty. His was also a photography of denunciation, but traversed by the poetry of the gaze capable of capturing the enchantment of everyday moments, as in the famous “stolen kiss” under the porticos of St. Mark’s Square, present in the exhibition along with other significant shots.
To complete the exhibition, the film Gianni Berengo Gardin by Giampiero D’Angeli, screened for the duration of the exhibition, accompanies the public to discover the unique gaze of the master.
“This exhibition is first of all a tribute to Gianni Berengo Gardin, one of the greatest interpreters of Italian and international photography, capable of telling without stereotypes the soul of places and people. But it is an exhibition that, through his gaze, also wants to be a tribute to Venice, to this city within which Palazzo Flangini reveals itself more and more as an open and shared space,” stresses Giovanni Dell’Olivo, Director General of the Venice Foundation. “Through Berengo Gardin’s gaze we observe Venice in its entirety, with its challenges and problems, but also in its extraordinary uniqueness, from which flow the great opportunities that the city has before it and that it will have to know how to seize. It is a challenge that concerns everyone, and one that can be won in only one way: by working in synergy and networking. In this new season that we are celebrating today, the Foundation stands to be more and more the strategic pivot of this network.”
“Showing the images of Gianni Berengo Gardin,” says Denis Curti, curator of the exhibition, “means dealing with the discipline of the gaze. Long and in-depth reportages, such as dying in class or inside homes, collaborations with prestigious institutions like the Touring Club and companies like Olivetti. His long career is built on themes of social and ethical engagement. Behind him are nearly 300 books and more than 200 exhibitions. Numbers that well restore the specific weight of one of the best known and most representative figures in Italian photography.”
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| Berengo Gardin and Venice in black and white: Fondazione di Venezia opens Palazzo Flangini with photography |
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