Beauty, mystery, obsession. One of the greatest exhibitions ever dedicated to Italian Symbolism. Over 140 works — paintings, sculptures, engravings — reveal to the general public the most visionary season of Italian art between the 19th and 20th centuries: a chapter that developed in close dialogue with an international trend that stemmed from various interpretations of Pre-Raphaelitism and from a French and Central European culture that had Gustave Moreau and Arnold Böcklin as some of its main references. Yet, the Italian path to Symbolism managed to elaborate its own physiognomy, recognizable in the convergence between spiritual demands and the constant reflection on myth and landscape capable of blending tradition and modernity.

Nature as a living organism, myth as a disturbing experience, the female figure as an ambivalent presence, the landscape as a space of interiority, the graphic sign as a vehicle of the invisible: these are the thematic nuclei of the seven sections of the exhibition, conceived to convey the complexity and breadth of the Italian Symbolist imaginary.

In the renowned Villa dei Capolavori, one of the most important Italian artistic institutions, home to the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Mamiano di Traversetolo near Parma, just a few steps away from the rooms housing key works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Titian, Dürer, Goya, Canova, Morandi, Burri, from March 14 to June 28, 2026, the map of a movement that transformed dreams, myths, and mysteries into pictorial language is finally reconstructed.

The exhibition "Symbolism in Italy. Origins and developments of a new aesthetics 1883-1915," curated by Francesco Parisi and Stefano Roffi, carries out a necessary critical operation: it distinguishes the artists who consciously elaborated a Symbolist lexicon from those who occasionally adhered to iconographic trends. The philological reconstruction of an autonomous language emerges, developed in close dialogue with European research but endowed with its own characteristics.