We're still here, talking to you about our Neapolitan summer in this fiery 2023 where getting around is increasingly tiring for old folks like us. So what do we do? A nice subway ride on Line 1, where several new trains have come into operation that are more accessible for wheelchairs and are air-conditioned; get off at the TOLEDO station and with a short walk along Via Toledo we arrive at Palazzo Reale (*), one of our most visited accessible places. At Palazzo Reale, until 3 October 2023, the exhibition Paladino.The 104 drawings of Pulcinella is held, curated by Flavio Arensi, in which the 104 drawings made in 1992 by the well-known Campanian artist Mimmo Paladino, who was inspired by the album Divertimenti per li regazzi (1797) by Giandomenico Tiepolo, are exhibited in the Genovese Gallery. A tribute by Paladino to the eighteenth-century Venetian masterpiece made up of 104 cards illustrating the adventures, death and resurrection of Punchinello. Through the recently restored drawings of Punchinello Mimmo Paladino conducts a risky showdown with drawing and art history, which he resolves to appropriate both of them and mockingly beat them. But let's see what the director of the Royal Palace of Naples, Mario Epifani writes:
The link with Naples is strengthened by the iconography of the collection itself: the protagonist is the Neapolitan mask par excellence, that of Punchinello. In Venice at the end of the eighteenth century, at the end of the Serenissima Republic, the stories of Punchinello become in Tiepolo's drawings the mirror of a society that has by now become a caricature of itself. Today, in Paladino's drawings, the dreamy figure of Punchinello expresses the genius loci of Naples: it is no coincidence that, in the year in which Napoli won its third Scudetto, Mimmo Paladino chose to create a new drawing in which Punchinello celebrates the victory of the soccer team, which is added to the series and is exhibited here for the first time. So let's start with this new Punchinello to illustrate the exhibition:
And this is the reproduction of one of the works by Tiepolo we talked about:
Below is a selection of other Paladino drawings:
How about? And if you are less lazy than us and manage to get to Royal Palace early enough, you will also have the opportunity to visit the newly inaugurated Caruso Museum, dedicated to the great tenor and which we will try to tell you about shortly.
HAPPY MID-AUGUST!!! (*) symbol indicating the presence of accessible toilets