Te-stories. Stanze per un racconto
For the third edition of the Festival Archivi Futuri organised by the MA*GA Museum in Gallarate, Casa Testori presents on the first floor a new exhibition created from its archive and library, featuring thematic rooms that tell its many stories through manuscripts, paintings, photographs, books, and videos.
The exhibition
Each room’s theme is inspired by Associazione Testori’s recent acquisitions: from the 52 volumes of the “Biblioteca di Letteratura” series, edited for Feltrinelli by Giorgio Bassani and with cover designs by Albe Steiner, to a selection of pictures from the photo shoot held at the “premiere” of “L’Arialda” in Rome in December 1960 and preserved by the Archivio Luce Cinecittà. The exhibition will be an opportunity, both to closely examine some unpublished notebooks and typescripts from the Fondo Testori owned by the Lombardy Region, and to discover a preview of upcoming publications, such as the Proceedings of the Conference held for Giovanni Testori’s birth centenary and the history of Casa Testori.
Specifically, the rooms are set up as follows: the first one is the large parents’ bedroom, showcasing the story of the “Biblioteca di Letteratura – I Contemporanei”, the historical Feltrinelli series directed by Giorgio Bassani from 1958 to 1963, in which Testori published five books, including the entire cycle of “I Segreti di Milano”. Additionally, it’s the first time that the letters in which Testori entrusted his work to Bassani, preserved in his heirs’ archive, are presented to the public.
The second room is dedicated to the photographic narrative of “L’Arialda”’s Roman premiere, which, in a way, marked the “outburst” of the cycle “I Segreti di Milano”. Here it’s presented a copy of some pictures from an unpublished photo shoot acquired by the Archivio Testori, thanks to an agreement with the Istituto Luce Archive of Rome, which holds the negatives from the Dial-Press agency (over 70,000 images). This is an extremely important documentation of the premiere directed by Luchino Visconti and staged at the Eliseo Theatre.
The third room delves into the case of Erodiade, the play written by Testori in 1968 and performed by Adriana Innocenti only in 1984. It provides a deep dive into the wonders of the Archivio Testori: the powerful manuscripts from which everything originates, the pen-and-ink drawings of the Teste del Battista and the watercolors that followed. The room also features photos and fascinating actress props, donated to the Association by her husband, Piero Nuti.
The exhibition path continues in the fourth room that presents the pastel Crocifissioni, a series of extraordinary intensity that has to be placed in close relation with some of Testori’s key painters in those years, such as Graham Sutherland, but also to be considered as an occasion for rethinking the works of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. The cycle is displayed alongside the manuscripts and the typewritten drafts of the poetic collection Ossa Mea, that the pastels somehow visually recreate.
Finally, the fifth room is Testori’s boyhood room: his first studio, the place where he could hang the Nudi maschili attributed to Géricault and Courbet on the walls. The bright space, overlooking a small terrace with a garden view and designed in the 1930s by the architect Cassi Ramelli, is transformed for the occasion into a reading room, where visitors can “begin” their exploration of the Testorian world, thanks to recent publications that are improving the knowledge of his work.
Posted on: 5 March 2025, by : Alessandro Frangi