The exhibition tells the story of music as one of life’s vital necessities, a shared space in which people meet, clash and rediscover each other… music contaminated with poetry, counterculture, painting, film and theatre to become a driving force for cultural and social change.
The event is part of Palazzo Esposizioni Roma’s commitment to shedding new light on the cultural trends that have become part of Rome’s life blood, whether through artists born and bred in the city or through artists from different cultural environments who have contributed to it, moulding it into a crossroads of international exchange and experimentation.
The era we’ve chosen to showcase, the 1970s, was a decade in which Rome became an astonishing crucible of artists, ideas, styles and sounds that spread throughout Italy while engaging with the rest of the world.
The exhibition explores music’s unique contribution to the decade in a layout designed by THREES, the organisation that devised the international music festival Terraforma, displaying a diverse collection of materials and documents featuring the leading players of the era such as Francesco De Gregori, Antonello Venditti, Rino Gaetano, Renato Zero, Lucio Battisti, Franco Battiato, Mia Martini, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, PFM, Area, Le Orme, Osanna, Rovescio della Medaglia: comprising some 700 photographs, many of which will be on display here for the very first time, along with video material, posters, concert tickets, musical magazines, fanzines, flyers, books, record covers, musical instruments and a map of Rome’s musical haunts (clubs, parks, concert halls and so forth). Visitors are accompanied throughout by a soundtrack of iconic songs and sounds consisting of both original versions and contemporary revisitations specially produced for the exhibition. The organisers will also be producing a series of video interviews for the occasion with Stefano Pistolini talking to Renzo Arbore, Dario Salvatori, Francesca Marciano and Roberto D’Agostino.
Far from merely serving as a background accompaniment, the music marks the rhythm and pace of the exhibition narrative, accompanying it and amplifying it.
To tie in with the major exhibition devoted to Mario Schifano running concurrently on the first floor of Palazzo Esposizioni, Romasuona opens with the famous soirée held at the Piper Club in Rome on 28 December 1967, entitled Grande angolo, sogni & stelle which starred the progressive rock group Le stelle di Mario Schifano to the accompaniment of multiple film screenings, strobe lights, sitars and dancing. The event was devised by Schifano to involve artists, musicians, performers and poets in the name of that successful mingling of different art forms that was the result of a desire to transform creativity from an isolated avant-garde occurrence into a crucial element in the city’s connective tissue.
The exhibition will be closing on the same communal note by conjuring up the first Festival internazionale dei poeti (International Poets’ Festival) organised by Simone Carella, Franco Cordelli and Ulisse Benedetti at Castelporziano from 28 to 30 June 1979 under the aegis of Renato Nicolini, who was Rome’s councillor for cultural affairs at the time. The festival, which was attended by thousands of young people on the free beach of Castelporziano in Ostia, hosted such poets as Dario Bellezza, Fernanda Pivano, Dacia Maraini and Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, together with such luminaries of US poetry as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, John Giorno and Allen Ginsberg.