The exhibition The Milky Way. Declinations of White in the 20th Century, from December 7th, 2024 to March 16th, 2025 at Villa d’Este, aims to investigate the concept of white within the artistic production of the 20th century, proposing an unprecedented dialogue between contemporaneity and the classical code, inserting the examination within those signs that characterize the city of Tivoli and its history: from the monochromatic environment of the statuary marbles of the Mouseia of Villa Adriana to the exhausted travertine quarries to the albule waters, with the calcareous sediments and their whiteness that seem to characterize a millenary landscape in the instances of contemporaneity.

Organized by the Autonomous Institute Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este - VILLÆ and curated by Andrea Bruciati, Director of the Institute, the exhibition project elects the tabula rasa as protagonist, understood as both a reset and a page on which to rewrite the artistic research of the 20th century - from abstractionism to spatialism, from poor and conceptual art to performance -, in which the monochrome is configured both as a code of reduction and annihilation of subjectivity, and as an open space that lives on the sensations of the work's viewer.

Ground zero of color and creative gesture, thanks to names such as Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, and Alberto Burri, white has become a manifesto of new artistic reflections, particularly in the Italian panorama.