The Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este Institute - VILLÆ of Tivoli, on Wednesday, July 2, 2025 at 5:00 pm at the Antiquarium of the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor, presents the exhibition Venus&Mars by the artist Anna Franceschini, which aims to pay homage to the archaeological site, its collections, and its industrial history.

The exhibition (open to the public until November 15, 2025) represents the outcome of the commissioning project through which the Institute won the public notice Strategy Photography 2024 promoted by the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and documents, through a corpus of 12 analog photographs, a moment of scenographic reactivation of the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor.

The monumental archaeological site, still relatively unknown compared to the grandeur of the nearby Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este, was chosen to host a scenotechnical apparatus capable of recalling both its ancient devotional nature and its crucial industrial past. In modern times, in fact, the Sanctuary of Hercules Victor hosted armories, powder magazines, a paper mill, and Italy's first alternating current power plant.

The exhibited photographs are the result of an installation created using elements from the artist's archive activated by the electrical energy produced by a Tesla coil and are able to enhance in the site, even today, the same suggestions that once so fascinated the Flemish painters.

Brueghel the Elder visited the foundry and chose it as the setting for his Allegory of Fire and the Allegory of Love, which inspired the title of the exhibition, created in collaboration with Rubens.

Within the project, archaeological finds from illegal excavations in Italy have also been valorized, repatriated following investigations by the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, and assigned to the Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este Institute, which ensures their protection and public use.