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TO CARE OF.
Piero Maccarinelli
with the collaboration of
Monica Trevisani
Festival dei Due Mondi 's interest in bringing back the costumes that have made the history of the event continues. Piero Maccarinelli - already curator of the exhibition Frammenti di un percorso teatrale, rearranged for Spoleto65 again at the spaces of Palazzo Collicola by temporally relocating the costumes on display by tracing them back to the Menotti years - inaugurated, on the occasion of Spoleto65, the new exhibition entitled The Menotti Years 1958-1998, a tribute to the founder of the Festival, named the "Duke" of Spoleto for having brought to the Umbrian city the excellences of the international artistic scene, making it famous all over the world.
The exhibition, located at the spaces ofEx Monte di Pietà, starts from a series of original sketches of theatrical costumes and scenes kept for years in the vaults of Spoleto's banks and now made to available to the general public by the Foundation Festival dei Due Mondi after a work of recovery and identification.
In addition, thanks to the collaboration with the Istituto Luce, the exhibition includes 40 photographs that testify to the cultural and social richness and internationality of the "Menotti years."
Audiences will thus be able to admire of L'italiana in Algeri from 1969, directed and staged by Patrice Chéreau, sets by Richard Peduzzi and Patrice Chéreau and costumes by Jacques Schmidt; Amahl and the Night Visitors from 1996, by and directed by Gian Carlo Menotti and costumes by Christine Edzard; and The Nose from 1995, by Shostakovich directed by Roman Terleckyj and costumes by Alessandro Ciammarughi. Finally, original posters and programs from the 1969 and 1996 editions of Festival dei Due Mondi are also on display.
Thanks to the collaboration of Casa Menotti Documentation Center on Festival dei Due Mondi, finally, the exhibition is expanded with a series of period films, covering the years from 1958 to 1998, and with redigitized images of reports broadcast by Radar and Luce newsreels re-edited from Roland Sejko.
It is with conviction and enthusiasm that Cinecittà has decided to contribute to The Menotti Years 1958-1998. And not only because of the idea of paying tribute to a figure of Gian Carlo Menotti and, at the same time, because of the prestige of the setting offered by its Spoleto Festival, a landmark of the national cultural scene. to convincing us was, above all, the ability of the curated exhibition from Pietro Maccarinelli to cross some of the fundamental principles that guide the activity of an institution like Cinecittà.
The Menotti Years 1958-1998 respects the open and interdisciplinary conception we have assigned to our cultural mission - the seventh is an art that embraces and contains all others. Therefore, bringing our gaze back to photographs, period sketches, or the stage furnishings means inviting viewers to to make the necessary cultural and semantic excavation to reconstruct the grammar and material assumptions of theatrical but also cinematic expression. to dwell on individual signifiers to enable the overall view of artistic meaning.
The idea of bringing them back to life, making them visible again, to objects and images that belong to the past, corresponds to the deepest function we can attribute to their preservation: not fondaco, inert repository of memory but mnestic body, ready to to generate new meanings, useful illuminate the present.
At the same time, The Menotti Years 1958-1998 is a fitting recognition of the talent, technical wisdom and artistic value of those workers without whom-we must never forget-no theatrical or cinematic art form would be possible.
Chiara Sbarigia
President Cinecittà Spa
