La città visibile

La città visibile

Design and realization of 10 interactive installations.

“The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

No photograph or no video could describe alone a city like Bergamo; a city that has come out unscathed from the cement pours and the ugly suburbs built in many other urban centers in the Sixties and has kept intact both the magic of the Middle Ages and Renaissance part and the vitality of the new center built between the two world wars.

Bergamo is a city to enjoy by walking on its large avenue as well as through the streets of the center in the Lower Town or in the Upper Town; and it is with this principle that we have created “La Città Visibile” (“The Visible City”): photographs, vintage films, “surprising” objects, virtual reality, interviews and an image reading workshop invite the visitor to walk through the exhibition, sit in its cinema or at tables that bring us back to the atmosphere of the Fifties and Sixties. Not a photographic exhibition, but an exhibition that intends to “revive” the places, the faces, the different souls of a city which has known between 1870 and 1960 the years of its profound change.

The main source of the exhibition is the Sestini photographic archive, deposited at our Museum: a preciousness due to the ability of Domenico Lucchetti to collect, in decades of activity, the photographic and cinematic material necessary for the construction of a city photo library with wide glimpses of the world and the sensitivity of the Sestini family, who, with international projection, wanted to give the city the opportunity to reflect on its past, even the most recent one, because, as the president Roberto Sestini says: “Is it not true that without the past the future cannot be built?”