A photography exhibition curated by Giorgio Lanza has been on display in a wing of a former primary school since 2001. Lanza, who is from Vicenza, spent years on his research to recount a cross-section of Fogazzaro’s world, his life and his times with a range of photographs, both original and reproduced. Lanza’s exhibition was originally displayed at the cloisters of Santa Corona, Vicenza in 1988, but due to its success and to a meeting with scholar Giovanni Matteo Filosofo, an enthusiast of Fogazzaro’s work, an exhibition entitled “Tonezza e Valli dell’Astico e Posina” was set up in Velo in 1989. It was sponsored by the local tourist board and thousands of visitors, including a number of famous ones, flocked to see it. Filosofo then planned to make the exhibition permanent, adding letters, articles, paintings and a series of rare-edition novels in a bid to take a closer look at the surrounding landscape, which was the inspiration and backdrop for Fogazzaro’s novels.
“When we were setting up the exhibition, we wanted to introduce a section entirely devoted to Velo d’Astico, an aspect not covered sufficiently by Lanza’s exhibition. It was our duty to include this black-and-white appendix,” says Filosofo in his book “given that Velo d’Astico was such a major part of Fogazzaro’s life and work, with its fiery peaks in the clear blue sky, its shady parks and green grassy meadows on which stand noble villas, where the rivers Astico and Posina flow ceaselessly through the valley. This intensely poetic atmosphere has been rediscovered in photographs by Ugo Zanetti, Velo’s fondly remembered photographer (…). It was an attempt to capture a belle époque, one also experienced by Vicenza, that was swept away by the Great War, remaining a memory to call upon when one revisits with love and pure eyes the places and legends of Fogazzaro’s great little world.”
Source: “InCanti fogazzariani”, Giovanni Matteo Filosofo, Editrice Veneta, Vicenza, 2011
Exhibition catalogue and personal research by Giovanni Matteo Filosofo
