ROME - The thousand signs on the walls of the Incompiuta in Venosa, a masterpiece of stone and poetry that the Benedictine monks abandoned before it was finished;
the reflections on history and the unsaid that seems to reveal itself in Monza from the darkness of the monument to Umberto I, "The good king" killed by the anarchist Bresci;
the rarefied pinks of the figures that Fra Angelico painted for himself and for the other religious in what was once his convent and which is now the small, poignant museum of San Marco in Florence.
Art is sometimes a question of looks, of different perspectives, of particulars capable of evoking thoughts.
And it is precisely the eye of the great authors of Italian photography, from Olivo Barbieri to Paola De Pietri, from Silvia Camporesi to Luca Capuano - just to name a first group - to accompany us on a fascinating and very special journey to discover places of culture at sometimes little known, little frequented, or simply, who knows why, forgotten.
Small and large masterpieces chosen from the hundreds of museum landscapes scattered almost everywhere in Italy and on which an ambitious photographic project by the Ministry of Culture, the theme of a large series of books and then of a major exhibition that will be set up in the autumn , now try turning on a different light.
Each in its own way, that's the beauty of it.
Maura Picciau, the art historian and director of the National Institute for Graphics who conceived and curated this adventure created by Massimo Osanna's general directorate of museums, explains to ANSA to the great photographers who have been asked to collaborate in short, total freedom was offered.
Different and unique visions, therefore, each journey a book - four already published - which are flanked from time to time by the equally free voices of a narrator and a critic, among many Melania Mazzucco, Marcello Fois, Franco Arminio, Lisa Parola .
"Altri sguardi", as summarized by the title chosen for the series in press with Corraini Edizioni.
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While waiting for the exhibition to be held in the rooms of Palazzo Poli in the autumn and which will try to bring together this kaleidoscope of different visions in a single phantasmagorical journey, the four volumes already published are worlds in themselves to be discovered.
Like Garibaldi's dazzling Caprera captured in Paola De Pietri's shots, immersed in a white and rarefied light like the spartan rooms of the house scattered with memorabilia of the hero of two worlds to whom the delightful tale of Marcello Fois also gives voice.
Or like Horace's Venosa, where even the walls of the modern city, its squares, its fountains tell a story made up of stratifications, "an unfinished alphabet", as Barbieri defined it, which can be found here on street corners like in the archaeological park,
overlooked by the complex of the Holy Trinity with that never finished church, nature and culture that intertwine and the "beauty of broken things", as Franco Arminio poetically underlines.
In a small garden in Monza, the monumental Expiatory Chapel designed by Sacconi to commemorate the murdered king is revealed in the work of Silvia Camporesi with an explosion of details, the engraved motto of the Savoys, the recurring theme of the knot, the design of the grate.
But also the anarchist assassin's shoes, his gun.
A work "around what the monument seemed to no longer say", confides Camporesi to the writer Lisa Parola, a gaze that focuses on distance, on the difficult relationship between memory and its contemporary definition.
In Florence it is
eye steeped in architecture of Luca Capuano to give us starting from the details the marvels of the museum of San Marco, that "paradise of art and books", to quote the passion of Melania Mazzucco, which houses more works by Beato Angelico than any other museum .
The bare feet of the monks peeking out under the white table with the remains of a meal of bread and cherries, the carved frame of a crucifixion, the stunning white of one of the cells.
Details, unexpected visions, points of view.
Somehow sidelong glances that eventually find themselves in each of these different works.
And that all together, as the critic Marinella Paderni underlines, encompass the meaning of the entire project: that of "unveiling what a place can give us unexpectedly,
