Italy hosts the largest open-air museum in the world: a widespread heritage of monuments and commemorative statues that inhabit squares and streets of large and small cities, often ignored or taken for granted, but central in the construction of the country's collective identity. In fact, it is the Italian experience that has defined a monumental model that has imposed itself internationally.

Starting from the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, still today a symbolic focal point of the Capitoline Hill in Rome, public statuary has crossed the centuries, from the Humanism to the Renaissance, to find an extraordinary expressive intensity in the decades following the Unification of Italy.

MonumenTO, Turin Capital. The shape of memory, an exhibition project curated by Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa and Cristina Maritano in collaboration with the civic administration, arises from the encounter between a need for critical reinterpretation and a concrete opportunity: the extensive photographic campaign conducted by Giorgio Boschetti, which has given the Turin monuments a new and unexpected presence. Through striking nighttime images, the statues emerge from the darkness as isolated figures, removed from urban noise and returned to a close-up view, capable of capturing their expressions, postures, and formal tensions. A work that not only documents but reactivates, transforming the city into a true Theater of Memory.

These images are complemented by the impressive map of Turin made in ink on paper by Alessandro Capra, who has adopted a surprising "hybrid" solution: the zenith view of the ancient heart of the city, centered on Piazza Castello and Palazzo Madama, gradually gives way to a bird's eye view, ending at the infinite meridian on Monviso. In the dense network of streets and squares that make up the urban fabric, the 79 public monuments of Turin are located, numbered on the plan and represented one by one in individual tiles along the edges, in a comprehensive view that allows the viewer to grasp the entirety of the monuments and their distribution in the territory.