An innovative new exhibition in this northern Italian city enables blind and sighted art lovers to enjoy the unseen side of modern sculpture.
Visitors to 'Un senso per l'arté' (A Sense for Art) can opt to be taken around the exhibit blindfold, led by blind guides, who help them discover the works on show via touch.
"We aim to take able-bodied people into the world of the disabled and use personal experience to sweep aside many stereotypes," explained Giovanni Battista Flaccadori, the president of the provincial section of the Italian Union of the Blind, which helped organize the exhibit.
"It's not so much a matter of getting sighted people to understand what it means to be blind, it's more one of helping them appreciate the extraordinary sensorial possibilities certain physical limitations open up".
At the end of the tour visitors can take off the blindfold and go around comparing the sensations they got from touching with what the works actually look like. The exhibition, which runs at the city's Sant'Agostino church until March 26, also has explanations and descriptions in Braille, so blind visitors can enjoy it on their own.
There are 39 works on show by a range of Italian artists.
"We chose different figures and materials too," said Eugenio Benaglia, the exhibition's curator. "They go from cold bronze to warm wood, from smooth figures to rougher ones; all united by the same theme - touch."
The highlight is a piece by Bergamo sculptor Giacomo Manzu' (1908-1991), considered one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th-century. Manzu' is probably most famous for his creation of the
doors of St. Peters Basilica in Rome and for the eight-meter bronze statue of mother and child standing outside the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Although a committed leftist activist, he had an excellent relationship with Pope John XXIII, who was also from Bergamo. The Manzu' piece on show here, entitled La Pace (Peace), also depicts a mother and child.
There are works by Elia Ajolfi, Piero Brolis, Alberto Meli, Franco Normanni, Ferruccio Guidotti, Gianni Grimaldi and Gregorio Cividini too. The exhibition is open Tuesday to Sunday; blindfold tours must be booked in advance.
