The National Museum of Matera remembers, 100 years after his birth and 70 years after his death, the Lucanian writer, poet and politician Rocco Scotellaro (Tricarico 1923- Portici 1953), with an exhibition and performance itinerary that aims to read his work and personality in an innovative way, bringing together archive materials and contemporary languages. A dutiful homage to this extraordinary figure of a young militant intellectual, to whom the large canvas “Lucania 61” is dedicated, created by Carlo Levi for the celebrations of the centenary of the Unification of Italy in Turin, and exhibited in the Museum of Palazzo Lanfranchi, together with the portraits of Scotellaro and his mother, Francesca Armento, by the same Turin artist and writer.

The exhibition itinerary is set up in the Church of Cristo Flagellato, part of the former San Rocco Hospital, an emblematic place in Scotellaro's biography as it was once the site of the prison where he was unjustly detained for 45 days in 1950.

The figure of Rocco Scotellaro is first told through a series of materials from various archives: a terracotta bust portraying him, created by the artist Giuseppe Antonello Leone between 1949 and 1950 (Leone-Padula heirs); letters and postcards addressed by Rocco Scotellaro to Leone and epistolary exchanges between Scotellaro's mother, Francesca Armento, and the artist couple Giuseppe Leone-Maria Padula, after Rocco's death (Leone-Padula archive, Archival and Bibliographic Superintendence of Basilicata ); photographs portraying Scotellaro with people linked to him in Basilicata and Campania (State Archives of Matera – Rocco Mazzarone Fund); a video documentary made in 1963 for the anniversary of Scotellaro's death, with testimonies that remember his figure (Teche Rai Basilicata).

These archive materials are enriched by a series of artistic proposals linked to contemporary languages: the photocollages created for the occasion by the photographer Mario Cresci; the plates of the expanded re-edition of the comic "One is distracted at the crossroads - the cruel rowdy of Rocco Scotellaro" by the illustrator Giuseppe Palumbo; a gallery of "sentimental portraits" of Scotellaro by the young Lucanian visual artists Kalura, Antonio Poe, Gloria Pizzilli, Arturo Lauria, La Tram; some canvases that tell of Scotellaro's relationship with Carlo Levi, his mentor and friend, and the Matera artist Luigi Guerricchio, who was strongly influenced by Scotellaro.