Vernissage Saturday, September 6 at 6.30 pm. Festival del Paesaggio – Travelogue. Landscapes with Ruins

Festival del Paesaggio – Travelogue. Landscapes with Ruins
Vernissage: Saturday, September 6, 2025, 6:30 PM

The Festival opens to the public Sunday, September 7.

Villa San Michele once again becomes a stage for international contemporary art. From September 7 to November 3, 2025, the museum will host the 9th edition of the Festival del Paesaggio, curated by Arianna Rosica and Gianluca Riccio, entitled Travelogue. Landscapes with Ruins.

This year’s edition reinterprets the theme of the “Journey to Italy,” focusing on the cultural and iconographic significance of the ruin. Site-specific works and installations by Angelo Mosca, MASBEDO, Katarina Löfström, Alessio de Girolamo, Sislej Xhafa, and Luca Pancrazzi transform this symbol—shifting it from nostalgic tradition to a living trace of historical, artistic, social, and personal landscapes.

Travelogue. Landscapes with Ruins unfolds as a journey—a contemporary Grand Tour—exploring echoes of the past in contemporary artistic research and new relationships between art and landscape.

In the exhibition:

Alessio de Girolamo (1980) presents a sound installation merging musical memory with digital language, creating a bridge between past and present through a living, intimate soundscape that evokes the breath of a nocturnal, abstract, and personal Capri.

Angelo Mosca (1961), with his installation Reperti, offers a series of paintings investigating the relationship between ruin and discovery, between what has been and what can still emerge from art as an act of excavation and vision.

Katarina Löfström (1970) brings to the Villa’s park Open Source (4:3), a large wall made of thousands of sequins that respond to wind and light. The work reflects the surrounding landscape, producing a fragmented, ever-changing image: a shimmering screen on which sky, sea, and time are projected.

Luca Pancrazzi (1961) reflects on artistic practice as a relational process and on the poetic value of the discarded. At Villa San Michele he presents small terracotta landscapes that evoke memory, myth, and poetic archetypes—everyday fragments transformed into abstract horizons, marked by the silhouettes of an “archaeology of the ordinary.”

MASBEDO, the artist duo formed by Nicolò Massazza (1973) and Iacopo Bedogni (1970), present the video work Resto. The project takes its name from the boat carrying a large screen on which a sonata by Gianandrea Fioroni is projected. Performed on the waters of Aci Trezza in Sicily, a place evoked by Giovanni Verga in The House by the Medlar Tree, the work explores the relationship between humanity and landscape, engaging historical memory and the present, and inviting reflection on belonging, travel, and environmental impact.

Sislej Xhafa (1970) presents an installation consisting of an arch topped with the neon word “Paradiso” and a simple table with plastic chairs. Playing on the tension between tourist imagination and everyday reality, Xhafa’s work reflects—through sharp irony—on the desire for happiness and its banalization. He also presents two public projects in Anacapri’s historic center: The Flag Project – III edition, a symbolic action on identity through artist flags, and Manifesto, a visual project spread across the town’s public billboards.

Alongside Travelogue. Landscapes with Ruins, the Festival also includes RUINA. Searching for an Identity between Ancient and Contemporary (September 7 – November 3, 2025).

In this project, five young female artists present works at Villa San Michele that move between past and present. Addressing themes ranging from the fragility of public and personal memory, to the relationship between intimate and collective history, artistic creation and social dimension, their works explore the fragmentation of cultural and historical orders and the effort to trace within this landscape of ruins the origins of a new visual language.



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