The exhibition, which was born thanks to the collaboration with the Alinari Foundation for Photography and curated by Rita Scartoni together with Muriel Prandato, will accompany the viewer among the varied landscapes of the Arezzo area following the traces of a long history of industrious creativity. To represent the lands of Arezzo, the images of the great photographers Alinari and Brogi, Vittorio Alinari, Aurelio Monteverde and Vincenzo Balocchi have been selected.

The photographic story develops starting from the shots of Alinari and Brogi, photographers-editors as they defined themselves, engaged in a monumental work of documentation of the Italian cultural heritage: the lands of Arezzo emerge through the themes of art, landscape and of work. And it was precisely starting from the Arezzo area that Vittorio Alinari undertook, in 1908, a photographic journey along the course of the Arno: a poetic testimony of his personal artistic research, updated on the avant-garde photographic currents in Europe, parallel to the enlightened activity of entrepreneur at the helm of Fratelli Alinari. During the twentieth century, the amateur photography of Aurelio Monteverde, the artistic research of Vincenzo Balocchi, the extraordinary value of the documentation work of the Valdarno lignite mines, lead us to the discovery of other ways of vision.

Drawing on the rich deposit of visual memories of the Alinari Archives, a window opens onto a hundred years of history of the Arezzo area, from 1856 to 1954. What emerges is a variegated social landscape made up of valleys bordered by hilly arches and high mountains, punctuated by a great wealth of medieval artistic testimonies with an economy mainly based on agriculture which however sees the launch of important industrial initiatives. A land of farmers, laundresses, shepherds, monks, men and women of ingenious industriousness. If compared to today, these images inevitably confront us with the 'transformative' nature of time, bringing out elements of continuity and significant landscape and social changes. And if however every land, like a face, has identity characteristics that remain over time, the breadth of the variegated horizons and the vivid traces of a long history of industrious creativity can be summarized in that 'subtlety of the air' to which Michelangelo, jokingly with Vasari, he attributed his own genius: whereupon Michelangelo reasoning with Vasari once as a joke said: "Giorgio, if I have anything good in my genius, he came from being born in the thinness of the air of your town of Arezzo ; […] Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Florence, 1568.

The exhibition, visible until 7 May 2023, is divided into four rooms displaying 56 shots as well as the digital version of the album, also from the Alinari Archives, which documents the lignite mines of the Valdarno.