THROUGH VERONETTA
Thursday 12 October starting at 8 pm – Via Venti Settembre – Verona (meeting point in piazza Santa Toscana – ex Edicola)

WALKING THE STREETS OF VERONETTA

“A combination of many things: memory, desires, signs of a language; cities are places of exchange, as all the economic history books explain, but these exchanges are not just exchanges of goods, they are exchanges of words, of desires, of memories.” This is how Italo Calvino described them in Invisible Cities (1972), a collection of short stories in which it is not that difficult to find a piece of one’s physical and soul-related geography. And it is in these words, recalling the great Italian writer in the year in which he would have turned one hundred, that the project Attraverso Veronetta finds inspiration. The project is a walk along the historic buildings of via Venti Settembre, and at the same time a story, like the one that Marco Polo shares with the melancholic emperor Kublai Khan, leader of the Tartars, arousing in him amazement, doubt and wonder. Curiosity and imagination are the two keys to approaching the itinerary: indeed, the buildings can only be visited from the outside in a “magical” atmosphere, immersed in the silence of one of the great arteries of the city, via Venti Settembre, closed to traffic for the occasion. Veronetta is the Left Bank of the city, a neighborhood that knows how to combine history and contemporary culture and that brings social issues back to the centre, a harbinger of contaminations capable of narrating our time. It is a decentralised and inclusive model of warm city in which urban environments are humanised and brought back to their function of authentic participation and sociality.
It is no coincidence that one of the headquarters of the University of Verona, as well as many cultural associations, contemporary art galleries and artisan workshops are located here, so as to engender a sort of genius loci, enriching a social identity that becomes an indispensable resource for the community. Over the years, ArtVerona has sought to enhance these realities together with their characteristics, a plurality of voices that have always expressed themselves by generating cultural liveliness, far from any form of approval, with the aim of listening to minorities, as art history has always been teaching us. The project Attraverso Veronetta should be read as an event that encourages participation with the aim of enhancing and improving the territory, while respecting the environment, history and memory.

With the patronage of