From May 23 to September 28, 2025, the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia, in the CAMERA OSCURA space dedicated to photography, set up within the path of the Perugian museum, hosts the exhibition "Gianni Berengo Gardinphotographs Giorgio Morandi's studio", curated by Alessandra Mauro.

The exhibition collects 21 of the most significant shots taken by Gianni Berengo Gardin (Santa Margherita Ligure, 1930) in 1993, when he was called to document the places where the great Emilian painter worked, on the occasion of the opening at Palazzo d'Accursio in Bologna of the Morandi Museum. Before dismantling the studio, it was necessary to immortalize it forever.

The lens of one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century thus penetrates the environments where Giorgio Morandi's masterpieces were born (Bologna, 1890-1964), to tell the layering of places so lived, the wear and the evident familiarity with those rooms that were inhabited every day for years.

Gianni Berengo Gardin thus enters the intimacy of Giorgio Morandi; he stops on the objects often observed and portrayed in the paintings. With careful discretion, the photographer records the painter's space: the hat left on the bed, the mattress that still seems to bear the imprint of his body, to propose a small great "journey in a room" that has the scope of a real existential adventure. But above all, Berengo Gardin captures through the lens the vases, bottles, plates, coffee makers, and all the things that Morandi arranged with wisdom and order, before and after reproducing them in his paintings. Inside CAMERA OSCURA, we therefore observe the behind-the-scenes of the master's work, with the possibility of understanding even better the secret of his paintings.

"Gianni Berengo Gardin photographs Giorgio Morandi's studio" also in its 'spatiality' intends to pay tribute to the art of Berengo Gardin, evoking, in the visitor's mind, the studio, the intimate, secluded place of artistic creation.