LA SPEZIA – Italy rediscovered through the gaze of travelers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An immersive journey that leads us to rediscover the destination cities of the Grand Tour through the spaces of the Lia Museum in La Spezia among works from the museum collection and loans. “The exhibition features exceptional masterpieces and prestigious loans, destined to fascinate and attract a wide audience -. The Mayor of La Spezia explains Pierluigi Peracchini – The exhibition will lead us in the footsteps of travelers between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to discover Italy through cities such as Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples and, subsequently, our Gulf of Poets: a splendid opportunity to admire unique works in person, to deepen the knowledge of our collections and walk in the footsteps of the young scions of the European aristocracy, conquered by the beauty of unique places in the world”.
The exhibition, curated by the director of the Lia Museum Andrea Marmori, intends to focus on the journey of training and education which between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involved reaching places full of memory, where one could find comparison with the past and refreshment for body and soul. Italy was the country of memory and the great garden of Europe, and even the gulf of La Spezia became a destination, albeit late, for these cultured pilgrimages, a true natural attraction because, as John Ruskin stated in 1845 when he arrived here in the light of moon, no other place is “destined for watercolor” as much as this one. The exhibition is therefore a further opportunity to enhance the Lia collection, placed in dialogue with extraordinary works on loan from all over Italy, among others, from the National Gallery of Ancient Art of Palazzo Barberini in Rome, from the Civic Museums of Padua, from the Museum of Rome and the Art Collection of the Cariplo Foundation.
Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples: these are the four stages which the visitor to the exhibition, transforming himself into a nineteenth-century grandtourist, will discover in a completely new and immersive installation through an extraordinary aesthetic experience. The exhibition, in fact, begins with the portrait of Pompeo Batoni from the National Gallery of Palazzo Barberini, and the reasons why the great journey was undertaken. The exhibition includes around fifty works including paintings, sculptures and objects and involves, in fact, the entire museum space, starting from a nucleus of works connected directly or indirectly to the Grand Tour preserved at the Lia Museum. The section of eighteenth-century paintings is in fact made up of important figurative episodes that illustrate mainly two of the essential stops for eighteenth-century travellers, Rome and Venice, tireless models offered to the astonished gaze of the erudite visitor. High-end postcards, actual souvenirs of journeys undertaken, the canvases, as is known, portray both truthful views of the landscape, highlighting archeology in Rome and water and light in Venice, as well as unlikely panoramas where monuments are concentrated together distant but brought together for the client’s delight: landscapes and whims.
Alongside this main section, there is a route that illustrates the discovery and tourist interest of the Gulf of La Spezia and the Riviera with its immediate hinterland. The watercolor by Turner and Girtin included in the Museum’s collections, portraying a stretch of the La Spezia coast, becomes a useful link to introduce this section placed in dialogue with another conspicuous material nucleus from other civic collections. In particular, the collection of paintings by Agostino Fossati exhibited in the adjacent Palazzina delle Arti constitutes a chapter of particular value useful for illustrating the territory and the City
