The Exhibition “Grand Tour” at Casa Monti, Portraying Italy Without Consuming It
The other evening, Casa Monti did exactly what an art space should do more often: it slowed time down. The opening of Grand Tour, Manfredi Gioacchini’s photographic project, was not a vernissage in the traditional sense, but a quiet, almost domestic passage through the rooms of the boutique hotel in the heart of the Monti district. This time, the images were not there to be photographed in turn, but to be inhabited. Snapshots of an Italy emptied of mass tourism, observed at the moment it finally allowed itself to be vulnerable: architectures that breathe, landscapes that hold on to memory, details that ask for attention. A Grand Tour without rhetoric, far from the postcard and closer to meditation.
Casa Monti, an artist’s house by vocation, welcomed the project as one welcomes a guest: without superstructures. Gioacchini’s photographs slipped into the common areas, turning the hotel into a lived-in gallery, where art does not interrupt everyday life but subtly transforms it from within. Many well-known figures attended the Roman event. On view until 22 February, the exhibition ultimately leaves a simple, essential question: what remains of travel when we stop consuming it and return to practising it as an act of attention? In Gioacchini’s images, travel is not the accumulation of stops, but dilated time, listening to places, a sense of permanence. In short, an invitation to stay long enough to let spaces tell their own stories.
One final note, far from secondary: one of the works will enter Casa Monti’s permanent collection, as a discreet trace of a passage that did not need noise to be noticed.
Text: Germano D’Acquisto
Photos: Benedetta Guidantoni
