Milano 2020

In February 2020, Lombardy and Milan became the European epicentre of a pandemic that strains the health care system and society, impacting people’s psyches and forcing political, economic, and behavioural choices unheard of in Europe since the end of World War II.

Taking its cue from the exhibition that the Braidense Library in Milan dedicated to Giovan Battista Piranesi, the most famous engraver in the history of Italian art, the documentary is a road story through the iconic cities, landscapes and views that have become the heritage of our visual culture. Through works of art and ambient shots, the ninety-minute film traces Italy at the time when it was the favoured destination of members of European cultured society between the late seventeenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century.
Rome, Milan, Venice, Florence, and Naples, the glimpses of the countryside, the Alps, Vesuvius with Pompeii, the vestiges of Magna Graecia and the Empire, to the rural scenes and festivals of popular tradition, represented a must-see for lovers of painting, sculpture, architecture, and landscape design.
The film documents the works that have built Italy’s imagination over the centuries by placing them side by side with the landscapes they portray and that are still pilgrimage destinations for lovers of beauty. Probably no moment like the present has, in recent history, such a connotation of return and such a determined force to rediscover the Grand Tour. If centuries ago it was the way to return to the taste of the classic from which Western culture started, today it takes on the meaning of returning to Italy after it was the European epicentre of the pandemic. It is from this scar, which reopens the Bel Paese and the sense of rediscovering it precisely by starting with those who discovered it by undertaking a long journey before us.

Italy 20202 – 90 min.

DIRECTORS: STEFANO PAOLO GIUSSANI AND FRANCESCO INVERNIZZI

FROM AN IDEA BY VITO SALINARO

Taking its cue from the exhibition that the Braidense Library in Milan dedicated to Giovan Battista Piranesi, the most famous engraver in the history of Italian art, the documentary is a road story through the iconic cities, landscapes and views that have become the heritage of our visual culture. Through works of art and ambient shots, the ninety-minute film traces Italy at the time when it was the favoured destination of members of European cultured society between the late seventeenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century.
Rome, Milan, Venice, Florence, and Naples, the glimpses of the countryside, the Alps, Vesuvius with Pompeii, the vestiges of Magna Graecia and the Empire, to the rural scenes and festivals of popular tradition, represented a must-see for lovers of painting, sculpture, architecture, and landscape design.
The film documents the works that have built Italy’s imagination over the centuries by placing them side by side with the landscapes they portray and that are still pilgrimage destinations for lovers of beauty. Probably no moment like the present has, in recent history, such a connotation of return and such a determined force to rediscover the Grand Tour. If centuries ago it was the way to return to the taste of the classic from which Western culture started, today it takes on the meaning of returning to Italy after it was the European epicentre of the pandemic. It is from this scar, which reopens the Bel Paese and the sense of rediscovering it precisely by starting with those who discovered it by undertaking a long journey before us.