Amman, Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Jebel Alweibdeh, March 15-29 2007

Jordan National gallery of Fine Arts, with the patronage of Princess Ghida Talal, and in cooperation with the Italian Embassy in Amman presents a photography exhibition, a hundred years long, to tell the story of Italy, the one and only. Truly one and only since, despite its many facets and inimitable features, Italy has made a name for itself throughout the world and whatever sector comes to mind, it will always have something uniquely Italian. Throughout the twentieth century Italy was defined for better or for worse by the succession of events, anomalies and aspects that marked its development. Today, on the threshold of the third millennium, in the face of any possible attempts at cultural splintering and hoping to confirm anew the uniqueness of this country and its history, we intend to celebrate it all with an exceptional photographic exhibition.

A hundred years ago, Alinari (the oldest firm in the world in the field of photography) already had fifty years experience to its credit in documenting the story of Italy, and was offering the world the history of art in pictures. Today Alinari is presenting the public with a visual coverage of a century of events in the life of this nation, and is presumptuous enough to hope that the visitor will pause, however briefly, before a picture in sudden awareness of just how much has happened in these hundred years.

Curated by Cesare Colombo, the exhibition includes twenty-two thematic sectors, in each of which the various topics are dealt with according to style and period. The photographs are by well known Italian and foreign photographers and have been classified in keeping with the great historical subdivisions of the twentieth century. From the early 1900s the exhibition moves on to the Twenties, then to World War II, the 1960s and lastly to the current decades. With the «archaic» Italy of uncontaminated landscapes and people whose faces reflect their struggles and determination as its point of departure, the exhibition moves on through wars and famines, narrating the development of the nation in pictures of monuments and architecture, means of transportation, industry, crafts, design, fashion, food, education, art, literature, music, theatre, cinema, radio and television, medicine, up to the latest technological and scientific conquests. The land is crossed from east to west, from north to south. The fields are farmed. Hamlets and cities grow. Life goes on apace in the homes and factories, and in the service sector. Communication networks criss-cross the country. Bartering and selling. Eating and dancing. Holidays at the sea, tourism and folklore are other salient features of our collective image. But the social changes in the 20th century are also marked by the flow of migrants: up to thirty years ago emigration, and now immigrants to Italy in search of economic security.

The 204 photographs on exhibit, by over 140 photographers, have been carefully selected from the collections of the Alinari Museum, the Alinari archives and the principal Italian and foreign museums, as well as from those of the photographers themselves. The pictures of a century ago by Alinari, Brogi, Wulz, Nunes Vais, Michetti (to name only a few) are countered by those of Leiss, Lattuada, De Biasi, Patellani, Berengo Gardin, Giacomelli, Basilico, as well as by the most famous non-Italian photographers who focussed their cameras on Italy, such as Stieglitz, Cartier-Bresson, Capa, Klein, etc.