Photographic exhibition curated by Serafino Amato
13 May – 30 September 2023
National Archaeological Museum and Roman Theatre
Via Sant’Agata,18/a

“Dacia Maraini. Viaggi nel mondo” is the title of the photographic exhibition held from 13 May to 30 September 2023 within the spaces of the National Archaeological Museum and Roman Theatre of Spoleto (Via Sant’Agata, 18/A) curated by Serafino Amato: about fifty large and medium format photographs taken by the author between the 1960s and 1970s.

The initiative opens on Saturday 13 May at 5 p.m. with a meeting, in collaboration with the Associazione Fondo Alberto Moravia, in which Dacia Maraini will discuss the theme of the exhibition together with writer Lorenzo Pavolini.

In her travels around the world, often in the company of Alberto Moravia and, on other occasions, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Maria Callas and other artists, photographers and filmmakers (Andrea Andermann, Gianni Barcellona, Roberto Faidutti, Sebastian Schadauser), she has travelled across several continents, from Central America to Asia, capturing with her camera the monumentality of archaeological sites as well as that of nature, investigating with singular narrative skill the charm of a past that continues to evoke its greatness, in traditional costumes or through the ruins of ancient architecture.

Having travelled to places that would be unimaginable to reach with the same freedom today, makes these documents even more precious, evidence of a vanished world, traces of a humanity that has been transformed.

Dacia Maraini, mindful of her father’s lesson (her father Fosco was an anthropologist and photographer of distant lands and cultures), has always carried a camera with her, offering through it, but even before that with her smile and curiosity about the most distant cultures, a strong document that is somehow written in photograms that in the precision of their sequences are in themselves accomplished stories.

Those who have been lucky enough to see her archive can realise how much attention and care she has always had for this means of expression.

The flow of tradition and modernity, of memory and oblivion, the power of nature, are poetically interwoven in the sequence of about fifty shots selected for this exhibition by Serafino Amato, which ideally dialogue with the rich collection of artefacts preserved in the rooms of the National Archaeological Museum and Roman Theatre in Spoleto.

This exhibition, which can be visited until 30 September 2023, is intended to pay tribute to the work of Dacia Maraini, a writer and investigator of the cultural and social phenomena of our time, as well as to her multifaceted nature that, in addition to literary narration, also expressed itself through the camera lens, offering the opportunity to get to know one of Italy’s most authoritative writers and thinkers better and more closely.

The exhibition ‘Dacia Maraini. Viaggi nel Mondo” is promoted by FIDAPA Spoleto in collaboration with the National Archaeological Museum and Roman Theatre of Spoleto, the Regional Museums Directorate of Umbria, the Alberto Moravia Fund Association, the City of Spoleto and the Festival dei Due Mondi Foundation, with the fundamental support of the Amen Foundation, the Urbani Tartufi company, the Amici di Spoleto Onlus Association, the Crisalide Anti-Violence Centre and the “Women against War” Association, and with the patronage of the Spoleto Rotary Club and the Spoleto Lyons Club.

For the entire period of the exhibition, the National Archaeological Museum and Roman Theatre of Spoleto is planning a series of meetings with authors and presentations of books related to the theme of the exhibition event, including travel, rights and cultural identities. In collaboration with the UBIK bookshop in Spoleto, after the inaugural conference with the author Dacia Maraini, the next appointment is scheduled for Thursday 25 May 2023, at 5 p.m. with the writer, a finalist for the 2012 Strega Prize, Marco Mantello, who will discuss his latest book entitledMarie Gulpin (Neri Pozza, 2023) with the writer Carola Susani in collaboration with the Associazione Fondo Alberto Moravia. Porzia Addabbo, Nessuno Tocchi Caino Board of Directors, will be present.

Dacia Maraini photographer
A ‘real’ photographer encapsulates the semantics of seeing without hesitation, in a single shot he finds the subject, the predicate, the object and, if he is good and lucky, even the adjective. The meaning of a sentence enclosed in a frame and little matter the size. I looked at these photos with a photographer’s eye, it is true, I am easily moved by pictures, no matter whose. I had these photos in my hands for years, first at the Moravia Fund, single shots though. I couldn’t find anything other than the subject in many of Dacia’s photos, but when I got my hands on the negatives and the proofs the plot became clear to me. Dacia writes ‘…the cameras were companions of adolescence‘. Were Fosco’s cameras in plain sight or available? What is certain is that anyone who loves photography cannot help but love the camera, the transparency of the lens and the discreet mechanics of an object built to receive the forms of reality through light. A Kodak camera, it was called ‘Retina’: never was the name more appropriate. Dacia used her father’s Leica, she says, then bought an SLR with her first money. Not so unconscious Dacia when she says that she loves the normal lens, the 50mm. to be clear, an optic that restores proportions ‘without bringing the field too close, nor too wide‘. A difficult choice, because ‘telling a story’ with a normal 50 mm lens is, and has been, something few people know how to do well. “I think of photography in terms of storytelling, I like the photo to tell something, even if only in hints“. Dacia’s choice is to tell stories and, even if photography is not as congenial an instrument to her as the ‘pen’ is, in the repetition of the sequence she marks the sentence, even different images link together for two, three and sometimes many frames. “Photographs as notes of thought, of travel“, notes in the form of a story. In front of a discovery one is moved, this guided me. I have not discovered a photographer, Dacia knows very well that a cultivated passion, even from childhood, is not enough to become one, but she has returned to me, with her photographs, and I hope also to those who will observe them, her passion for the ‘things’ of life, from breathing, to light breathing. Love, trees, animals and landscapes, traversed with the dear friends of a lifetime ago and those of today.

Serafino Amato

Information: Museo Archeologico Nazionale e Teatro Romano di Spoleto 0743 223277
Press: Antonella Manni, Mob. 3395993281