“This woman drags the whole of Moscow and the whole of St Petersburg behind her; they don’t just imitate her work, they imitate even her personality.” Praise of that stature is rare for an artist at any time. But these words of Sergei Diaghilev, the great ballet impresario, were spoken in 1913 and they acknowledged […]
Sustainable fashion is about more than recycling scraps. As the Sustainable Thinking exhibition at the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum demonstrates, clothing can be crafted from the most unexpected resources.
“No meaning, no symbols, no sense” was one pre-war American verdict on mining magnate Solomon Guggenheim’s collection of abstract art. Echoes of that public resistance to painting and sculpture with no recognisable subject matter are still heard today. Why does abstraction leave many people scratching their heads? As the astonishing selection from the collections of […]
Sandro Botticelli was the creator of complex allegories: it’s no wonder that his Birth of Venus, like Michelangelo’s David, has been reinterpreted and re-presented in every possible form by artists down the centuries. With its latest exhibition, “Botticelli Reimagined”, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London strives to mix modern interpretations of the Florentine painter’s […]
Modern Ancient Brown, the exhibition by McArthur Binion currently on view at the Museo Novecento curated by Lorenzo Bruni was opened and closed in this moment of extreme uncertainty and carries with it shelter, healing and solace. The show develops through three rooms on the ground floor and institutes a paradox […]
Until January 5, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino stages Bruno Ravella’s and João Carvalho Aboim’s production of Puccini’s classic Christmas opera, a story of love, hunger and roofs-over-heads in fin-de-siècle Paris. Peopled by penniless, sensitive and starry-eyed students, its themes need no updating, which lets Angela Giulia Toso and Tiziano Santi go hammer-and-tongs at period costumes and […]
Fifty years after the protests of 1968—a pivotal year for social reform and revolution around the world—Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi is inaugurating Dawn of a Nation: From Guttuso to Fontana and Schifano, an exhibition covering the second post-war period to 1968 in Italy. The show opens to the public on March 16, 2018. Through more than 70 works […]
In “The Ephemeral Museum of Fashion” exhibition at Palazzo Pitti, the substance stands up to the fifteenth-century setting in a way that charms the visitor, fashionista or not.
It may always be sunny in Philadelphia, but it’s (nearly) always summer in Florence. Spanning alfresco aperitivo spots to highbrow arts performances, the annual cultural festival Estate Fiorentina offers a blend of events that’s as crowd-pleasing and fresh as an Aperol spritz. The best part? You can drink it all up well into autumn. Here […]
