Face to face with Monet, revolution at the Ducale in Genoa

GENOA - Turning social distancing into an opportunity, with the caveat that '5 minutes face to face with Monet' can cause falling in love syndrome.
    The intuition of the director of Palazzo Ducale in Genoa Serena Bertolucci and the president of the Palazzo Ducale Foundation Luca Bizzarri is ingenious: since the exhibitions can no longer be opened because it is not possible to ensure the distance, we put a work in the center of a room and we allow five minutes to visit alone.
    Thus, anyone who enters the Doge's apartment in Palazzo Ducale, welcomed by the splendid 'Countess' of Boldini, loaned for the occasion by the Municipality of Genoa who owns it, is faced with 'The water lilies' which in general, as her sisters have a home at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris and today they are here in Genoa.
    You can choose: to stand there completely bewitched and immersed in silence, or listen to Monet played by Luca Bizzarri who tells you about his 'water lilies' or even immerse yourself in Arvo Part's 'Spiegel im explains' for an experience on the edge of the psychedelic .
    "We had to make a virtue of necessity - said Bizzarri - and so we thought of making an exhibition with only one painting, an important and beautiful painting but only one".
    Before arriving in the presence of the 'Water Lilies', from the darkness of the Doge's apartment 'La Contessa' comes out, a canvas painted in 1901 by di Boldini, now owned by the Municipality of Genoa. A splendid canvas that bears the unmistakable initials of the artist, made of fast vibrant brushstrokes of color, so suitable for restoring the melancholy and sensual charm and natural elegance of a protagonist of the beautiful Parisian world.
    Then turn around and see it: perfectly illuminated, extraordinarily close. So close that you can see the brushstrokes that make up the fleshy water lilies and so moving that like Proust you find yourself wanting to reach out to touch that water that looks like a sky.
    "We must rediscover another dimension - Bertolucci said -, we have been forced to rediscover another dimension. Such an exhibition is the only one possible today and it is a real, concrete exhibition. Intimate".
    The experience of '5 minutes face to face with Monet' is truly psychedelic. It is a bet won at the start, a model that will have to be replicated because culture "is a fundamental element for regaining one's identity, after what has been," said the Councilor for Culture of the Municipality of Genoa Barbara Grosso.
    The water lilies will remain in the Doge's Palace until 23 August.
    (HANDLE).