One hundred years after his birth and almost twenty years after his death, the Ethnographic Museum named after him dedicates an original exhibition of his photographs to the memory of Giacomo Bergomi (1923-2003). Some paintings of peasant subjects belonging to the family collection are flanked by numerous images, taken by the painter-anthropologist between the 1980s and 2000s in the countryside of the plain and in some corners of the Brescia mountains to capture moments, glimpses and views that would have been in followed by fixing on canvas. Cultivated fields, farmhouses, barns, orchards, vegetable gardens - kissed by the summer sun or wrapped in the white winter snow - are flanked by compositions of agricultural tools, wooden portals, dilapidated walls, where the human presence is only nostalgically evoked, in memory of the peasant civilization of the first decades of the century in which the painter was born and spent his childhood. The silence and suspended time are broken by the bodies and decisive gestures of rare human figures caught while carrying out rural jobs such as dehusking and drying corn on the threshing floor, harvesting winter bitter roots, and doing laundry on the canal.

The exhibition ends with some portraits of characteristic characters from the countryside of Barco di Orzinuovi and of women, men and children from San Colombano di Collio and Bagolino: it is in them, and in general in the most remote villages of our mountains, that Bergomi glimpsed the authenticity and humility combined with the pride of the peasant people of the past. He dedicated a large part of his pictorial production to them, celebrating their work, ingenuity and deeds through the rich collection of objects and tools that have been preserved in this Museum since 2004.