MonumenTO, Turin Capital. The Shape of Memory

Italy is home to the world's largest open-air museum: a widespread heritage of monuments and commemorative statues that adorn the squares and streets of large and small cities, often overlooked or taken for granted, but central to the construction of the country's collective identity. Indeed, it is precisely the experience of Italy that defined a model for monuments that has established itself internationally.

Starting with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, still today the symbolic centrepiece of the Campidoglio in Rome, public statuary has spanned the centuries, from Humanism to the Renaissance, and subsequently found an extraordinary expressive intensity in the decades following the unification of Italy.

MonumenTO, Torino Capitale. La forma della memoria (‘MonumenTO, Turin Capital. The Form of Memory’), is an exhibition project curated by Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa and Cristina Maritano in collaboration with the municipal administration. It arose from the combination of a need for critical reinterpretation and of a concrete opportunity: the extensive photographic campaign conducted by Giorgio Boschetti, which has given Turin's monuments a new and unexpected presence. In his striking nighttime images, the statues emerge from the darkness as isolated figures, extracted from the urban noise and bustle of the city and restored to a close-up view, capable of capturing their expressions, postures and formal tensions. The work not only documents, therefore, but also reactivates, transforming the city into a veritable Theatre of Memory.

These images are complemented by the impressive map of Turin drawn in ink on paper by Alessandro Capra, who adopted a surprising ‘hybrid’ solution: the zenithal view of the ancient town centre, with Piazza Castello and Palazzo Madama as the focus, gradually gives way to a bird's-eye view, ending at the distant horizon of the distinctive Monviso peak, which stands next to the border with France and is very much a presence in the city. The dense network of streets and squares that make up the urban fabric is home to Turin's 78 public monuments, numbered on the map and represented one by one in individual panels along the edges, in an overall view that allows the viewer to see all the monuments and their distribution across the territory.

The exhibition explores a century of public commemorative statuary in Turin, focusing on over fifty sculptural groups and offering a historical, critical, artistic, urban and social interpretation of the choices that have shaped the symbolic face of the city. The exhibition begins in 1838 with the inauguration of Carlo Marochetti's Equestrian Monument to Emanuele Filiberto and extends to the 1930s.

A multi-faceted Turin emerges through the works of art and monuments: a metropolis that was the Savoy capital of princes, generals and soldiers (from Emanuele Filiberto to Carlo Alberto to Pietro Micca); a city of social saints – Giuseppe Cafasso and Giuseppe Benedetto Cottolengo – celebrated in everyday life and monumental rhetoric; the leading city of the Risorgimento, which celebrates the heroes of the wars of independence and the struggle for Italian unification (from the Standard Bearer of the Sardinian Army to Massimo d'Azeglio, and from Garibaldi to Cavour); secular and positivist Turin, keen to commemorate figures from science, civil engagement and business (from Luigi Lagrange to Giuseppe Mazzini and Pietro Paleocapa).

The exhibition brings together around one hundred works – plaster models, bronze sculptures, preparatory drawings, periodicals, photographs and posters illustrating the work of the artists involved in the production of monuments for the city: first and foremost, Carlo Marochetti and Pelagio Palagi, favourites of King Carlo Alberto and exponents of Romanticism, who were succeeded after 1850 by Vincenzo Vela from Ticino, who, with his teaching at the Accademia Albertina, was able to impose his own realist vision, transforming the way monumental sculpture was conceived. Following in his footsteps were Giovanni Albertoni, Odoardo Tabacchi, Giuseppe Cassano, Giuseppe Dini and Alfonso Balzico, creators of some of Turin's most significant monuments. At the end of the century, the advent of Art Nouveau and neo-Romantic influences can be seen in the work of Davide Calandra, while Pietro Canonica, Edoardo Rubino, Arturo Martini and Eugenio Baroni were the leading figures of the first thirty years of the twentieth century, marked by the First World War and the advent of Fascism.

In addition to an important collection of works from the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, numerous loans have been made by various other Italian institutions, both public and private, including the GNAMC – Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma, the Musei Civici di Bologna, and the Gallerie d’Italia - Vicenza di Intesa Sanpaolo.

Thanks to the contribution of Intesa Sanpaolo and Cassa di Risparmio di Cuneo, it was possible to undertake the restoration of the important collection of preparatory plaster models by Edoardo Rubino for the Monumento al Carabiniere Reale (Monument to the Royal Carabiniere) belonging to the collections of the GAM in Turin. This operation was carried out by the Centro di Restauro di Venaria Reale. In addition, thanks to funds provided by the Fondazione Torino Musei for the exhibition, the restoration could be undertaken of Abbondio Sangiorgio's Dioscuri in the Musei Civici di Bologna and of three plaster sketches for the monuments to Lagrange, Gioberti and Mazzini owned by the Museums of Varallo Sesia. This represents a significant contribution to the promotion of an often-neglected heritage.

Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, director of Palazzo Madama, states: "A monument is never a fixed point in history. It is a complex system that keeps a question open: about the past it evokes, about the present that questions it, and about the future that receives it. The maturity of a democratic community is measured by its ability to fix itself in this trichotomy, without reducing it to simplification or resolving it through removal. In this context, Turin's ‘monumental grammar’ does not point towards definitive solutions, but offers critical tools: it teaches that public memory lives on only if it remains relational, if it accepts time as a condition, if it renounces the illusion of neutrality. It is in this exposure to duration and conflict that the monument still retains its civic function today”.

The exhibition, which will be accompanied by a public programme shared with the Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento, is hosted at Palazzo Madama, a deliberate choice in what was formerly the seat of Italy's first Senate, in front of which the first monument inspired by the Versimo (Realism) movement was placed in 1859: Vincenzo Vela's Alfiere dell'Esercito Sardo (Standard Bearer of the Sardinian Army), the first “political statement” in marble of Italy’s Risorgimento.

The exhibition highlights how no other European city has seen monumental sculpture linked to national history play such a central role as in Turin, first capital of the Savoy state and then, for a brief but decisive period, of the Kingdom of Italy. This cultural and political project was conceived during the reign of Carlo Alberto, with monumental statuary becoming a visual and symbolic tool for a broader plan for reform that encompassed the arts, the structure of the state, urban planning and public life, right up to the major legal reforms that were to influence a united Italy.

This driving force, which continued during the Cavour period, did not stop even when the capital was transferred to Florence in 1864, thanks to the support of the political, financial and business forces that promoted the city's building development and, with it, its monumental decorum. It was a joint project involving institutions, cultural associations and citizens' committees which, through subscriptions in which both the King and the City Council participated, gave rise to a veritable pantheon of illustrious men to whom we owe the political, economic, cultural and moral formation of Italy.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue edited by Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa and Renzo Villa, published by Silvana Editoriale and illustrated with photographs by Giorgio Boschetti.