INTERNO POMPEIANO, Gubbio

Luigi Spina is a photographer who has made method and attention the hallmark of his work. His projects are mainly guided by the aim of scrutinizing a context, a landscape, a phenomenon through serial photographic campaigns, where however each shot acquires its own autonomy. With this gaze, Spina dedicated himself to investigating the interiors of over one hundred and twenty domus in Pompeii, during the closure to the public of the Archaeological Park, then directed by Prof. Massimo Osanna, due to the pandemic.

The corpus of over 1450 shots gave rise to the publishing project "Interno Pompeiano", published by the publishing house 5 Continents Editions, a book of almost 300 large-format colour photographs, from which the shots exhibited at the Palazzo Ducale di Gubbio were extracted.

The idea of hosting the exhibition in this place is inspired by the fact that the Palazzo houses - albeit reconstructed - one of the studios of Federico da Montefeltro, a space of meditation designed on forms and iconographies that can easily build a close dialogue with the Pompeian interiors. It is undoubtedly the ancient context that inspired Francesco di Giorgio Martini in designing the inlays that completely cover the walls, just like the frescoes of the Pompeian domus. The idea that an interior can become the surface on which to propose stories, symbols and evocative images of those who inhabit it thanks to the construction of perspective boxes, thus takes a journey through the centuries, which in Gubbio offers many food for thought.

The “Salone di Corte” is the best setting to enhance Spina's images, which open windows onto an extremely contemporary past, in which one can grasp the refinement of environments and forms modelled by the changing light during the day, thus making even more spaces that have lost their function for millennia, to acquire a new one.