For spring 2025, the Labirinto della Masone dedicates an exhibition to Luigi Serafini: From Serafini to Luigi. The egg, the skeleton, the rainbow will open to the public on March 29 and will close on July 13, and is curated by the Franco Maria Ricci Foundation together with the artist himself, who for this exhibition space, to which he is particularly attached, has conceived an original path and a site-specific setup.

2025 marks the tenth year since the birth of the Labirinto and on the occasion of this anniversary the exhibition aims to be a true return to the origins, as it was Franco Maria Ricci, the publisher who first, in 1981, published the Codex Seraphinianus by a then unknown Luigi Serafini. From Serafini to Luigi. The egg, the skeleton, the rainbow intends to retrace the artist's career, respecting the only chronology never accepted by himself, namely the tripartition between pre-Codex era, Codex era and post-Codex era. From the famous Serafini to the most intimate Luigi, the path leads to the root of the dream, chasing the inspirations of the real world that his imagination then developed into the mad worlds of this unique work.

An important section of the exhibition at the Labirinto will focus on the "seraphinian prehistory," on what preceded the writing of the Codex. The first work completed by the artist will be present, depicting the family home in Pedaso in the Marche region; the relationship with this place, of which Luigi Serafini likes to define himself aboriginal, has deeply marked his aesthetic and poetic imagination, which will be documented through completely unpublished works and testimonies, unknown even to the great enthusiasts of the artist. Also from this "ab-original" phase come the years of architecture studies and an important trip to America, which will also be documented.

We then come to the Codex era, universally recognized as Serafini's masterpiece: the meticulous but delirious encyclopedia of a world that does not exist, written in a language that does not exist, clear but incomprehensible. The Ricci edition of 1981 remains a bibliophile treasure, and immediately the work of Serafini has aroused the interest of figures such as Italo Calvino or film directors like Federico Fellini and Tim Burton, to name just three. The exhibition will dedicate ample space to this extraordinary work, through an immersion, specially designed by Maddalena Casalis in collaboration with Luigi Serafini himself, in the tables that constitute it, juxtaposed with sculptures that bring into the three-dimensional world the visions of those pages.

In the post-Codex era fall all the works created subsequently up to the present day, collected in a single creative phase that makes little sense to periodize and segment as it is already all contained in the previous one, that is in that Other Universe that Italo Calvino in the first issue of the FMR magazine by Franco Maria Ricci summarized in this way, providing the inspiration for the exhibition title: “I would say that the images that most trigger Serafini's visionary rapture are three: the skeleton, the egg, the rainbow”.

The project concludes with some examples of what the post-Codex has been, including sculptures, paintings, and photographs. Visitors will also have the opportunity to experience entering the artist's Roman house, the Domus Seraphiniana, which precisely in these months is at the center of public attention because it is dramatically at risk of disappearing.

References and allusions, ironic and self-ironic quotations, jokes and mental traps, flashes and amnesias, hits and winks, jumps, excavations, dazzles will lead the visitor to get lost in a strange and brilliant world, in a path that, as is natural for the Labirinto and in reference to the artist's labyrinthine mind, will not be mechanically chronological but will present the seraphinian tripartition with originality and irony: From Serafini to Luigi. The egg, the skeleton, the rainbow is the opportunity not to be missed to discover or rediscover the incredible artist that is Luigi Serafini.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a homonymous volume edited by Franco Maria Ricci will be published.