The Italy of the first Italians. Portrait of a newly born nation

curated by Elisabetta Chiodini

The exhibition offers a comprehensive journey through Italian painting between the mid-19th century and the early 20th century, a period in which the newly unified country began to recognise itself as a nation. A collection of around eighty works recounts, with a choral and poetic gaze, the changes in an Italy that was transforming: from rural civilisation to urban modernity, from the silent landscapes of the countryside to the new industrial metropolises. The exhibition takes visitors on a journey divided into themes, reflecting the diversity of the territory, the complexity of society and the infinite nuances of daily life during those years of transition.

The journey begins in the rural world, the beating heart of nineteenth-century Italy, with views and scenes evoking village life, the rhythms of work in the fields and the harmonious relationship between man and nature. This is followed by seascapes, which reflect the changing beauty of the Italian coastline and the activities of those who lived by the sea, from north to south. The cities then take centre stage: Turin, Florence, Rome, Naples, Milan and Venice reveal, through the artists’ brushes, the new face of urban and bourgeois Italy, between innovation and tradition.

The Berardi Gallery is delighted to have contributed to this exhibition with the loan of the view The Po in Turin (1880) by Marco Calderini. One of the painter’s finest works in terms of optical clarity and lyrical atmosphere, in which the banks of the Po become the protagonists of a city growing in the aftermath of Italian unification and which now appears completely different.