Open until August 10, exhibition Alberi! 30 frammenti di storia d’Italia is an original journey into history, ecology, tradition, landscape, and legend, under the watchful, silent gaze of trees. Trees always accompany us, whether in daily life or in our greatest adventures.
M9 Museum will offer us a beautiful tree-lined avenue that subverts the parameters of history and will widen our perspectives. Is it at all possible to recount the history of Italy from the point of view of tree? An exhibition and a beautiful catalogue published by Marsilio Arte – both curated by architect and landscape designer Annalisa Metta, arborist Giovanni Morelli, and educator Daniele Zovi, with amazing illustrations by Guido Scarabottolo – are an intriguing, captivating, and positive answer. Alberi! 30 frammenti di storia d’Italia is an original journey into history, ecology, tradition, landscape, and legend, under the watchful, silent gaze of trees.
The gigantic Ficus in Palermo, the upside-down fig tree by the Temple of Mercury in Baia, the sycamore in Marengo planted by Napoleon, the lone sequoia that survived the Vajont Flood, and the Botanically Correct Fake Tree – a symbol not only of Christmas in your average 1950 drawing room, but also an observer of the public spaces we live in. Monumental trees, great patriarchs that populate our hills and mountains since centuries. “The lives of these trees – says Giovanni Morelli – end up being a container for the lives of people, the ultimate expression of long-term coexistence between a natural monument and the community around it. Not only we are looking at unparalleled natural allure when we see a monumental tree, we are also looking at a symbol, a narration, and a testimony. There is no monumental tree without memory and without context.”
Thirty stories plus one, authored by Daniele Zovi, on the beech forest of Cansiglio, north of Venice. A beech specimen, felled by Storm Adrian in 2018, found new life thanks to artist Aron Demetz, who turned it into an untitled sculpture in 2020. The art depicts two lovers who struggle to push their lives beyond the present time. Alberi! Shows how much trees are worth in terms of testimony and in their role of custodians of nature and Country as well as of our lives, in an emotional relationship that these living beings establish with humans.
