The early 20th-century spirit in Italy through literary magazines and art
Refined intellectuals, deep, complex, sometimes characterised by “incendiary” personalities, all very different from each other yet sharing a fundamental aspect: through the magazines they founded and directed, they all contributed to revive and foster the intellectual and political debate in Italy in the early 1900s. Now, for the first time, a museum fully describes and recounts, through the pages of its own leading lights, this restless and fertile period, fervent with ideas, visions, provocations whose brilliant and avant-garde feature goes beyond time and keeps bearing fruit even today.

The exhibition is entitled “Journals. Culture in Italy in the early 1900s”, and is open from 15 June to 17 September, in the new rooms of the Uffizi’s ground floor. Organized by the Uffizi together with the National Central Library of Florence, and curated by Giovanna Lambroni, Simona Mammana, Chiara Toti, it offers the visitor a complete overview of the most influential journals published in Italy during the first quarter of the 1900s: from its beginnings , with the harsh invectives of «Leonardo», signed by Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, to the pluralist evolution of «La Voce», also founded by Prezzolini, as well as the enthusiastic endorsement to the freedom of art fostered by «Lacerba» of Ardengo Soffici, to pass, in just over a decade, from the futuristic outbursts of Marinetti's «Poesia» to a rediscovered attention for the social field with Piero Gobetti («La rivoluzione liberale») and Antonio Gramsci («L’ordine nuovo»). Just beyond the threshold of the 1920s, still other new poetics came to light, as in the “Strapaese” of Leo Longanesi and Mino Maccari («L'Italiano», «Il Selvaggio») or in the daring internationalism of Curzio Malaparte and Massimo Bontempelli («900»).

However, all of them, in spite of their various positions, never gave up critical gaze, independent spirit, freedom of thought, which is an essential characteristic of great intellectuals in every age.

Over 250 pieces make up the itinerary of the exhibition: not only the original editions of the magazines, but also books, posters, sheets, covers, caricatures and a careful selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures of the time.