The Strega prize is told, 80 years of history on display at the Macro in Rome

The exhibition curated by Maria Luisa Frisa and Mario Lupano, created in collaboration with Bper Banca, Persol and Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, presents a ‘central room’ which restores the most intimate dimension – domestic and at the same time collective and relational – of the living room of the Bellonci house, the place where the Friends of Sunday met. A space, that of the exhibition, populated by the works and objects that inhabited the Bellonci house; enriched, among other things, by videos, by the ‘legendary’ blackboard on which the books that make up the five are still shown, by the urn with which people voted and by the document that represents the birth certificate of the Friends of Sunday. “The exhibition – Stefano Petrocchi, director of the Bellonci Foundation, explains to AdnKronos – is a way to tell, through the point of view of a literary prize and the books it promoted, the history of the country. A history that has often been intertwined with that of the competition, if only because the Strega was born in republican Italy with a structure that takes up the referendum of 2 June. That is, not a small group of writers who establish which are the best books of the year but a vast audience of readers, both professionals and non-professionals”. The work of the curators, continues Petrocchi, conveys “the complexity of the Strega prize in a plastic way. A prize that talks about contemporary Italy and which has drawn up an initial canon of Italian literature of the twentieth century, indicating to readers the books that will remain. The prize was fortunate enough to identify ‘Il Gattopardo’, ‘Lessico famigliare’, ‘Il nome della Rosa'”, recalls Petrocchi in this regard. In the exhibition “there is the story of how all this arose from a literary salon, an informal institution present in Rome in the immediate post-war years and which brought together the best minds of the moment. Milan had publishing, Florence had the great literary magazines and Rome had the literary salons”.

The exhibition project designed by the Supervoid architecture studio, together with the graphic project curated by the Caneva-Nishimoto studio, thus stages the different levels of interpretation that the long history of the Premio Strega offers to the visitor, also presenting the over one thousand volumes selected from 1947 to today, organized in a chronological sequence that tells, in parallel, the events, protagonists, controversies and media narratives that accompany the seventy-nine editions held so far. “The exhibition – highlighted the curator Maria Luisa Frisa – highlights the public aspect, that of the worldly aspect of the award, and the more intimate one, the living room of Casa Bellonci”.