“Photography should not reproduce the visible; it should make the invisible visible.” – Franco Fontana
Italian photographer Franco Fontana (b.1933), a pioneer of color photography, is best known for his boldly colored abstract landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes.
This book features previously unpublished and experimental images from his archive alongside some of his best-known works. Over the 60 years of his career, Franco Fontana photographed that which cannot be seen, and was able to capture images abstracted from reality, independent of the subject portrayed. This meticulously compiled volume is dedicated to those who are approaching this artist’s practice for the first time, as well as to those who wish to go deeper into his work by exploring these previously invisible spaces which the sensitive eye of the photographer has glimpsed and translated into a unique and unprecedented image.
Text in French.
Lorenzo Castore (b. 1973, Florence) is an Italian photographer whose documentary style captures the arbitrary passing of time in the street, in bars, on trains, with strangers, with friends. This book of luminous black and white photographs is the second in the Time-Maze series. This work was exhibited during Les Rencontres de la Photographie D’Arles 2022.
Issue 7: In our cover story, Roberto Tassi evokes a museum of Italian agrarian life, featuring brilliant if humble creations that transcend their utilitarian origins. The Manila Galleon carries both stunning Japanese folding screens and the gifted craftsmen who made them, across the Pacific to Novohispanic Mexico (Hwee Lie Bléhaut & Rodrigo Rivero Lake). In a magnificent show at the Hudson Valley’s Magazzino Italian Art, the geometric daring of architect Carlo Scarpa’s glasswork, created in 1920s-40s with Murano’s master glasscrafters (Marino Barovier). Vincenzo Patanè recounts Lord Byron’s last love, in Ravenna, while reviewing the great works of 19th-c. art that sprang from Byron’s unique visions. In Hors d’Oeuvres: Nobelist Orhan Pamuk’s Mr. PA returns to the Met, to delve into the secrets of Cézanne’s The Card Players, Simone Facchinetti studies the tricks of the art dealer’s trade, and we fondly remember our friend and colleague, Italo Calvino on the centennial of his birth.
“I experience the dishes of great chefs in a metaphysical sense, and I believe that food should be immortalized in all its beauty and importance, they are true sculptures, everything else is superfluous” – Bob Noto
Photographer, graphic designer, culinary traveler and gastronomic trend setter. This is not a cookbook, but the narrative that reveals to a wider audience the figure of one of the world’s greatest gourmet personalities Bob Noto. Texts by wine and food Journalists Marco Bolasco and Eleonora Cozzella with complementary photography reveal how, thanks to his talent and refined palate, Bob Nato became the pivot on which the world of Italian and European haute cuisine moved from the last decade of the twentieth century until his passing in 2017.
Text in English and Italian.
Stefano De Luigi’s images restore the landscape’s semantic value. The Italian landscape is a complex one, subject to the continuous superimposition of new signs. Yet in some ways, it is also a resistant landscape. While on the one hand, in fact, these signs – mostly similar and very much the offspring of consumer society and mass tourism – make Italy alternately a commodified trophy to be exhibited or “one anonymous, unfriendly, messy suburb,” on the other hand, they are sometimes grafted onto different realities – the upshot once again of those local identities that have long characterized the various areas of the peninsula – giving rise to genuine short circuits of meaning and vision where, in a bizarre potpourri, the contemporary and the ancient, the beautiful and the ugly, the rare and the banal, the serial and the unique all dialog with one another.
In 1922, Léon Bonnat bequeathed to the Louvre a wonderful album of almost forty drawings by one of the most famous painters of the Florentine Renaissance: Baccio della Porta, known as Fra Bartolommeo (1469-1517). The collection traces the career of the artist, who trained in Florence around 1485 with Cosimo Rosselli, but above all in the shadow of the most brilliant workshop of the period, that of Andrea del Verrocchio. Sensitive to the prodigious innovations coming out of this extraordinary environment, which had produced such geniuses as Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Leonardo da Vinci in the previous decade, Baccio, as he was then known, studied above all with Lorenzo di Credi, to whom Verrocchio had entrusted the running of the workshop when he left Florence for Venice. Baccio also closely followed all the great Florentine painters of the last decade of the fifteenth century, in particular the works of foreigners who had been in Florence for several years, especially Pietro Perugino, and those of Ghirlandaio’s workshop, then at the height of their popularity. The two volumes accurately reproduce the almost forty drawings in the Louvre album accompanied by a commentary written by two museum specialists.
Text in French.
A life dedicated to cooking, one of the best-known innkeepers and a true embodiment of the Italian trattoria, Franco Cimini tells his story for the first time in these pages, revealing his passions and the stories of the flavors that characterize his taste today.
A life spent pursuing the very strong ideals of belonging to and promoting the value of the land, from the Abruzzo origins praised in the memory of gestures and recipes from home to the growth of the bond with the Emilia region. Sealed by the love for his Anna, his partner in life and work, to his network of local producers, from Parmigiano Reggiano to the traditional Balsamic Vinegar of Modena, to the meats that he processes from head to tail, offal first and foremost, in the memory of countryside cuisine, with the complicity of the fireplace and the embers. A love story in which everyone can find themselves in the conviviality of the table and with good food of the Antica Osteria del Mirasole.
Text in English and Italian.
The Dialogues by Portuguese painter and writer Francisco de Holanda give unprecedented insight into the opinions, preoccupations and character of Michelangelo, already in his lifetime the most celebrated and influential artist in Europe. These Dialogues record his participation in the discussions about art hosted by Vittoria Colonna, his closest friend. Michelangelo’s opinions and ambitions during the period when he was painting The Last Judgement come vividly to life, as does the world in which he moved. No other text brings us so close to Michelangelo the artist, poet and thinker. The Dialogues are presented here in the classic translation by Charles Holroyd, painter, engraver, art historian and director of the National Gallery. The introduction by David Hemsoll situates the Dialogues in the context of Michelangelo’s career and the artistic world in Rome. Many of Holanda’s rarely seen drawings from the album he created of his Italian journeys are reproduced here, giving a vivid impression of the appearance of Rome in the sixteenth century. They are accompanied by a number of Michelangelo’s studies and finished drawings.
This book offers a privileged journey through the geography and history of Italian and international figurative culture kept at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, with works spanning a chronological period from the 13th to the 20th centuries. The Pinacoteca, born within the Enlightenment culture as a testimony to the progress of the human spirit, remains today a dynamic and lively instrument of civilization. The book reconstructs the patronage and provenance of the paintings and the way in which they were received; it specifies their technical data, as well as introducing comments and in-depth studies.
In addition, the rich illustrative apparatus leads to continuous comparisons and new explorations.
The exhibition Nasi Per L’Arte was born from the encounter between two curatorial noses belonging to Joanna De Vos and Melania Rossi. The nose is a navigator, guiding us through life; a delicate vehicle that detects and determines. It narrows and dilates at the same time, creating circular communication between the inner and the outer world. For this exhibition and book, a selection of contemporary artists such as Francis Alÿs, Michaël Borremans, Maurizio Cattelan, Laura de Coninck, Mariana Ferratto, Peter de Cupere, Jan Fabre, Mariana Ferratto, Sofie Muller, Luigi Ontani, Daniele Puppi and others, were in dialogue with artists of the permanent collection of Palazzo Merulana, Roma, and with loans of works by Oscar Jespers, René Magritte, George Minne, Constant Permeke, Léon Spilliaert, and others.
Text in English and Italian.
Maria Lai always had a special relationship with fairy tales. She considered them a metaphor for art and a way of communicating with the public in a simple, straightforward way. Starting in the 1980s, fairy tales became central to her art. Tenendo per mano il sole, Tenendo per mano l’ombra, Curiosape and Maria Pietra, are her most famous “sewn fairy tales” – books created by the artist using castoff textiles.
Maria Lai’s fairy tales are not merely children’s stories, but profound reflections on life and what it means to be a human being. They are often inspired by Sardinian myths and legends, to which the artist gives a personal twist, adding autobiographical details and philosophical reflections.
This edition of Tenendo per mano l’ombra is a printed version of Maria Lai’s 1987 tale. The original consists of fabric pages sewn together and collages of dyed textiles, on which the artist has embroidered geometric figures, yarn and other materials. The fairy tale tells the story of a human being (and his double) who must learn to accept shadows, the dark part of the world and of himself. The figure’s shadow, in Maria Lai’s fairy tale, is not a negative element to be rejected, but an integral part of his personality. To live an untroubled and complete life, one must learn to accept and live with it.
Elena Pontiggia’s concluding essay accompanies the reader in a fascinating page by page interpretation of the fable, and discusses Lai’s artistic and stylistic approach in the context of an extensive network of philosophical, literary and artistic references: from Kant and Manzoni to Klee and Malevič.
Text in English and Italian.
This volume collects the papers presented at the international study conference Sculpting in the Renaissance: an art to (com)move / Sculpter à la Renaissance. Un art pour (é)mouvoir organized by the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the Castello Sforzesco in Milan to accompany the exhibition Le corps et l’âme. De Donatello à Michel-Ange. Scultures italiennes de la Renaissance (Officina Libraria, 2020), held between 2020 and 2021. With the involvement of some of the most important specialists in Renaissance sculpture, the aim was to investigate the interactions, influences and exchanges between the plastic arts and other Renaissance art forms capable of revealing feelings through expressions of the body, trough the works of Agostino di Duccio, Donatello, Michelangelo and other local sculptors. The aim is also to place within their social, devotional and intellectual context the different manifestations of feeling of which sculpture is one of the privileged media. Sacred art themes in particular were addressed, in an attempt to explain their formal evolution in relation to the socio-cultural transformations of the time, but also to local traditions and their dramatization.
Text in English, French and Italian.
“A love letter to Italy expressed through fashion, craft, tradition, festivities, camaraderie, and sense of la dolce vita.” — Forbes
“… lovers of fashion will discover a world full of creative artistry and talented workmanship.” —The Hollywood Times
“This isn’t just any book. It’s an invitation, perhaps the only one, to experience the magic of Dolce&Gabbana up close.” — NL Magazine
Dolce&Gabbana’s Alta Moda shows are the epicenter of Italian fashion. The luxury lifestyle brand began its annual grand flourishes in 2012 and has since made a custom of staging the last word in Italian elegance with shows unlike any other, each lasting an entire weekend at an exclusive, invitation-only location.
Behind the scenes of these unique events, the preparations are meticulous, with designers, models, crew members, directors and makeup artists, all adding their finishing touches before the first silhouette is cast out on the runway. Matt Lever is one of only a handful of photographers ever invited to the shows. Covering almost every show since their inception, his images of the backstage commotion take us on a visual journey through Dolce&Gabbana’s intimate inner workings.
Lavishly illustrated, La Dolce Vita is a sublime coffee-table volume, perfect for fans and followers of high fashion and a compelling work of art for anyone with in an interest in the sculpting of the most lauded pageants in the fashion calendar.
The exhibition An Ancient and Honorable Citizen of Florence – The Bargello and Dante, sponsored by the Comitato Nazionale per le Celebrazioni del 700° Anniversario della morte di Dante Alighieri, is the result of the inter-institutional partnership between the Musei del Bargello and the Università di Firenze, and sees the collaboration between the Departments of Literature and Philosophy (DILEF) and of History, Archeology, Geography, Art and Entertainment (SAGAS) of the University of Florence. The Bargello is Dante’s place par excellence in Florence: here you can find the oldest portrait of Dante, painted by Giotto and his work in 1337, a period during which the Divina Commedia was being spread throughout the city. The catalog – rich with essays and extracts by numerous specialists – illustrates the complex link between Dante, his work and Florence, analyzing the dense network of relationships between painters, illuminators, copyists and commentators, engaged in an unprecedented editorial and artistic enterprise. The volume is enriched with illustrations of the works on display and illuminated manuscripts, as well as a precious final photographic atlas of the murals in the Podestà chapel, which houses the poet’s portrait. Dante was very often a frequenter of the different rooms as a prior of the Bargello and in these same rooms he received both his sentence of exile, and his sentence to death (March 10, 1302). The reconstruction of the delicate relationship between the Poet and Florence assumes an importance that goes far beyond city borders, indelibly investing the history of Dante’s fortune and the way in which we still look at him and his work today.
This publication discusses a bronze Laocoön recently sold at Bonham’s. Its new owners attributed it to Giuseppe Piamontini (1663–1744) ‘because of its manufacture and its extremely close proximity to the Doccia model’, the model employed for a porcelain Laocoön produced in the factory set up by Carlo Ginori (1702–57) in 1737 at Doccia near Florence.
Labelled as French and belatedly returned to Late Baroque Florence (but to the wrong artist), this magnificent group has finally revealed its identity. It is one of the incunabula of an ambitious young sculptor measuring himself with the sculptors of Ancient Greece and their great Renaissance followers of his native Florence. During the day he copied them in the Galleria degli Uffizi and in the streets of the city. At night he gathered together with other pupils of Foggini in the Borgo Pinti studio to study together. The prominent career to which Della Valle obviously aspired prompted his move to Rome. Della Valle helped us interpret the bronze correctly, interpret correctly its attribution in the Doccia models’ inventory and by extension understand better that document itself. But most important, our understanding of Florentine Late Baroque sculpture and of Della Valle’s art has acquired another firm point of reference.
Artemisia Gentileschi has been the subject of much attention in recent decades. Research dedicated to her has, however, often returned a stereotyped and reductive image of the artistic universe and personality of the painter. The professional figure of Gentileschi, who was able to move with great success in what we now call the art system, finally finds new dignity. Unpublished attributions from private collections are flanked by the painter’s masterpieces, reconstructing the framework of the international commissions that consecrated her as a protagonist of the European Baroque, in the most complete and up-to-date volume dedicated to the artist. The innovative charge of language and the exceptional nature of Artemisia’s iconographic choices reveal the documented interests and literary, scientific and musical frequentations that the painter skillfully cultivated in every city that recorded her passage.
Text in English and Italian.
The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore is the only patriarchal basilica of the four in Rome to have retained its paleo-Christian structures. The Basilica dates back to 425 AD and in this elegant and triumphal photographic masterpiece accomplished at the height of today’s technology, we can admire in detail the grandeur of all its artistic details: the mosaics of the nave; the ceremonial arch dating to the pontificate of Pope Sixtus III (432-440 AD); those of the apse made at the behest of Pope Nicholas V (1288-1292); the Cosmatesque floor; the coffered ceiling designed by Giuliano da San Gallo; the Nativity scene by Arnolfo di Cambio; the High Altar by Ferdinando Fuga; the Borghese, Cesi, Sforza, and Sistine Chapels; and the Crucifix and St. Michael chapels by Luigi Valadier.
The Basilica is Pope Francis’ final resting place.
Tradition has it that the Virgin Mary herself inspired the choice of the Esquiline Hill for the church’s construction. Appearing in a dream to both the Patrician John, the landowner of the Esquiline Hill, and Pope Liberius, she asked that a church be built in her honor on a site she would miraculously indicate.
Text in English and Italian.
Investigations by Sara Penco stem from the insightful finding of the absence of a key figure in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgement fresco. Prior to this illuminating research, Mary Magdalene was not unequivocally identified within Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Father Pfeiffer, with whom Penco establishes an inescapable dialectic, had already hypothesized the presence of Mary Magdalene in the fresco, but it is the scholar, for the first time in these pages, who convincingly justifies her identification. Mary Magdalene is closely connected to the salient episodes in the life of Jesus. The author rightly wonders, therefore, how it is possible that a figure so central to the biblical narrative and the Christian imagination could have been excluded from the depiction of the Parousia. This observation gives rise to an accurate reflection on the iconography of the saint and the Judgement, in relation to the sacred texts and in relation to Michelangelo’s poetics and production. Sara Penco traces Mary Magdalene in the tangle of figures on the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel, contributing to characterize the fresco – one of the best known and most appreciated works in the world – with an unprecedented theological message.
Text in English and Italian.
An elegant photographic book highlights BFF’s new headquarters. Viale Scarampo, in Milan, saw the inauguration in 2025 of the BFF Banking Group’s new headquarters, a building whose transparent airiness and environmental and social sustainability ensure it provides an entirely original contribution to the city’s skyline. Designed by OBR (Open Building Research), the structure places the accent on the brightness of its interior and does not seek to compete in height with the skyscrapers of the nearby City Life district. The book is organized in a series of alternating photographs and text, drawing attention not only to the architectural features and the building’s functional characteristics, but also to the aim of creating a working environment that is intimately linked to its surroundings, in contrast to the traditional view of corporate architecture.
Casa BFF is not only the headquarters of a B2B bank, it is also a building that embraces the neighborhood and the city as a whole, starting with the museum it houses, which is accessible to all and contains the BFF Collection of post-war Italian art. Here the visitor will find works by Valerio Adami, Franco Angeli, Enrico Baj, Alberto Burri, Lucio Del Pezzo, Lucio Fontana, Gianfranco Pardi, Mario Schifano, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Giò Pomodoro and Emilio Tadini. The Bank inaugurated the museum with an exhibition dedicated to Enrico Baj’s series of 40 etchings inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The book does full justice to the exhibition spaces, as well as to the works that hang on the building’s walls.
Text in English and Italian.
According to Count Galeazzo Arconati, who gave other Leonardo manuscripts to the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, the drawings concerning nature, anatomy, and color, have been “in the hands of the King of England before 1640.” The collection has been recorded as being in the possession of Queen Mary II, in 1690, a year after she and her husband, William III, ascended the throne as joint monarchs. The collection comprises all the known anatomical drawings by Leonardo. Three hundred images of the human body by the great artist, made between about 1485 and 1510–15, are showcased in this magnificent volume. Based on the artist’s own anatomical dissections, they show his evolving understanding of physiology. The drawings demonstrate, as well, Leonardo’s progress from technical mastery of his subject to consummate draftsmanship.
The commentary on this astonishing body of work is by Professor Martin Kemp of Oxford University, a leading international authority of Leonardo da Vinci, who explains the uniqueness of the painter’s stroke and the refined figurative transposition. One of the most renowned Italian Anatomists, Professor Mario Rende of the University of Perugia, analyses the significance of these works from a medical-scientific angle, revealing the insights, the research methodology, and the experimental and analytical approach of the Genius of da Vinci. Moving between art and anatomy, between unsurpassed illustrative display and avant-garde Renaissance scientific research, the work thus provides an in-depth and comprehensive look at an indispensable aspect of the Great Master’s story.
Text in English and Italian.
Gaetano Pesce traces the visionary collaboration between the Italian designer and American entrepreneur Jay Chiat, founder of the advertising agency ChiatDay. Through 500 images, rare archives, and previously unpublished interviews, this book explores the creation of ChiatDay’s New York offices—true laboratories of the virtual office concept. Conceived in the 1990s, this groundbreaking project merges art, architecture, and technology, redefining the very notion of workspace.
From Venice to New York, the book situates this adventure within the career of a leading figure of radical design, for whom humanity and diversity remain central to every form of creation. Gaetano Pesce offers a richly documented and visually striking journey into the world of a total artist whose influence continues to shape the way we think about work, space, and creativity today.
Text in English and French.
The volume Erté accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Labirinto della Masone and presents the figure of the artist Erté. Renowned for his extraordinary versatility, Erté designed theatrical sets and costumes, created jewelry, illustrated for world‑famous magazines, and worked as a fashion designer in Paris during the 1910s. More than fifty years after the first volume that Franco Maria Ricci dedicated to Erté, this new publication offers an extensive selection of the artist’s works, with particular emphasis on those from the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Texts by Valerio Terraroli, curator of the exhibition, and Alessandra Tiddia trace the production of an artist capable of capturing—always with taste and irony—the shifting fashions and their most dazzling, luxurious inventions, poised between modernity and exoticism. In these works, impossible elegances—bordering on the precious—and the sharp, feral allure of the femme fatale take shape, equally suited to the worlds of cinema and choreography.
Text in English and Italian
The Francis Bacon Collection is the result of an extraordinarily lengthy discovery and authentication process of previously unpublished works by Francis Bacon. This stunning volume includes the nearly 700 drawings, pastels, and collages in possession of Italian journalist Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. All the works have been photographed in ultra-high gigapixel, captured exclusively for the book. Commentaries and essays especially written for this edition are by noted art historians Edward Lucie-Smith and Fernando Casto Florez, together with an authentication report by Ambra Draghetti, the graphological consultant to the Court of Bologna for the authentication process. This elegantly produced edition presents new scholarship by Professor Umberto Guarini, who defended the legal authentication of the works at the Court of Bologna; Dino Cura, the President of The Francis Bacon Collection; and by Professor Maurizio Saracini, who pioneered the use of multi-spectrum diagnostic imaging and applied his technique to the drawings providing fascinating new details for the first time.
Text in English and Italian.
“So far, there haven’t been many women who have dared to dream on a truly megalomaniac scale—and see those dreams through to completion.” — Niki de Saint Phalle.
The story of the Tarot Garden, created by Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002), unfolds like a fairy tale. For the first time, this book documents the extraordinary adventure of its construction, from 1978 to 1998. It all began when, at the age of twenty-five, Niki de Saint Phalle visited Gaudí’s Park Güell and decided to give form to her lifelong “desire for grandeur.” The result was the creation of twenty-one monumental and esoteric sculptures spread across two hectares in Tuscany’s Maremma region—an artistic interpretation of the Tarot’s major arcana, a system that had long captivated her imagination. The Tarot Garden stands within a visionary lineage of fantastical environments, alongside the Palais Idéal of Ferdinand Cheval, Gaudí’s Park Güell, Alain Bourbonnais’s Fabuloserie, and the Gardens of Bomarzo in Lazio. Enriched with rare archival material, this book reveals the behind-the-scenes story of Niki de Saint Phalle’s magnum opus, shaped by Etruscan heritage, local craftsmanship, and rituals drawn from cultures around the world.
“Seeing the garden Gaudí built in Barcelona changed my life. From that moment on, my path would be a slow apprenticeship—until the day I, too, would be capable of creating a magnificent work like his, a place of joy.” — Niki de Saint Phalle.
Text in English, Italian and French.