A Magnificent Exhibition: A Didactic and Visual Journey Through a City Worth Exploring
The Press — The location is grandiose, with Italian architecture making a stylish appearance. This palace, the first stop on this exhibition that we hope will travel, is itself strongly marked by Italian influence in its architecture and ornamentation. At the initiative of "Nous tous," an association whose primary goal is to preserve the memory and heritage of minorities in Tunisia, who have all largely contributed to the country's development, a collective of researchers, teachers, and architects have dedicated themselves to this project.
The association had an impressive list of partners: the archives of the memory of Italians in Tunisia, the laboratory of Maghrebian archeology and architecture, the Dante Alighieri cultural center, whose director, Sylvia Finzi, is also the exhibition's curator, as well as the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
The goal was to find, select, prioritize, and present Italian influences in the architecture of Tunis and its surroundings. A vast and long mission, this presence being detectable since the 16th century. Teams of experienced and passionate researchers visited hundreds of palaces, places of worship, homes, and monuments.
They classified, cross-referenced, compared, and searched for testimonies and archives. The result is a magnificent exhibition, didactic and visually stunning, a living and visual journey through a city that we don't always know how to see, and which deserves to be explored. The exhibition is divided into four parts:
- The Novecento: Italian influence in the European city of the 19th century, marked by Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Eclecticism
- Mosques and Torbas: Italian influence in religious buildings in the Medina, with Baroque and Rococo styles
- Beylical Palaces: Italian imprint on the palaces
- Rural Italian Habitat: Memory of the villages in the lower valley of the Medjerda
The exhibition-journey features panels with photos of details, ceramics, frontons, and sculptures of selected monuments from among hundreds visited. It presents a corpus of texts by researchers. So many details, research, and iconographies that we would like to see become the subject of a book, catalog, or publication that would preserve their memory. In the meantime, the exhibition will be presented later at the National School of Architecture and Urbanism, and then at El Teatro.
