Exhibition : Capitano Luigi Martinotti. 1905 Viaggio intorno al mondo. Fotografie e scritti

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foto Martinotti

 

The exhibition illustrates il viaggio intorno al mondo made between 1905 and 1906 by the Turin captain Luigi Martinotti (1867-1915).A passionate tourist traveler, the captain undertook this long peregrination, driven by a strong desire to visit distant places and to learn about different cultures and peoples.

Leaving Turin alone in October 1905, Martinotti embarked in Brindisi for Patras, visiting over the course of ten months Greece, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, India, Ceylon, China, Japan and the United States, where he was impressed by San Francisco, reached a month after the earthquake that had destroyed the city. Returning to Europe from New York, he concluded the journey by disembarking in Hamburg and reaching Cape North, before returning to Italy, crossing Germany, in August 1906.

The detailed reconstruction of the journey, proposed in the exhibition, will be possible thanks to the archive material now preserved at the Polo di archivio storico ( PAST) of the University of Milan-Bicocca, received as a donation in 2020 by the jurist and legal historian Eva Cantarella, together with the personal archive of the sociologist Guido Martinotti, nephew of the captain and one of the founding professors of the university.

In particular, the stages of the journey are documented by a handwritten diary and numerous photographs taken by Captain Martinotti himself, which form a true iconographic set of the diary narrative. Once back in Italy, the captain, as an amateur photographer affiliated with the Photo Club of Turin, exhibited a selection of them at the “IV National and International Exhibition of Photography for Photographic Material”, which concluded in the Piedmontese capital on 17 February 1907.

A little over a hundred years after this event, the exhibition will introduce the public to the precious original materials collected by Martinotti during his tour, carried out with the famous English travel agency Thomas Cook.

During the opening period of the exhibition, moments of study and reflection on the themes proposed by the exhibition route will also be organized, accompanied by readings of passages from the captain's diary.

The exhibition will be open to the public from 7 October to 19 February 2025 at the exhibition space of the Sede Centrale della Biblioteca di Ateneo (building U6 Agorà, second floor, Piazza dell’ Ateneo Nuovo 1, Milano).

Admission is free and open to all, on the following days and times:

  • Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 21:30
  • Saturday from 9:00 to 13:30

 

Guided tours of the exhibition will be held:

  • Friday, November 8th at 1:00 p.m.
  • Monday, December 2nd at 6:00 p.m.

To participate, you must fill out the online form.

The events will be held at the exhibition space of the Sede Centrale della Biblioteca di Ateneo (building U6 Agorà, second floor, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo 1, Milano).Only the event on December 11th will be held at FrancoAngeli Academy (viale dell’Innovazione 11, Milano).

Sign up for the course  Bbetween - L’arte del viaggio: storie e immagini dal mondo by participating in at least 7 events you will obtain the Open Badge, a digital certification of the knowledge and skills acquired.