Luigi Naretti. Un fondo di fotografie ritrovato nella Biblioteca Antonelliana.

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Senigallia città della fotografie par Maurizio Mangialardi [21 mars 2019]

The City of Senigallia was appointed by the Regional Council of the Marche « City of Photography » a year ago. The home of Giuseppe Cavalli, Ferruccio Ferroni, Mario Giacomelli and many other photographers, is recognized as an exceptional place, a denomination of controlled cultural origin.

On May 2, 3 and 4, 2019 it will host the “première” of an ambitious Biennale, co-organized by the City Council and Serge Plantureux, with the collaboration of Francesca Bonetti, guest curator. […]

Exhibition – Petit Palais

At the Petit Palais (Palazzetto Baviera), the second exhibition devoted to the first periods of the history of photography (1839-1914).

[…]

Luigi Naretti was the first reporter in Abyssinia and Eritrea, these period proofs were (re)discovered in the archives of the Antonelliana Library in Senigallia by a local historian, Leonardo Badioli:

“It sometimes happens that the few who enter those archives where direct access is allowed

not to find the thing they are looking for but to come across anything that attracts attention,

however deviant from its purposes. Who on earth – even a lover of photography or colonial

history – would enter the Historical Archive of the Biblioteca Comunale Antonelliana in

Senigallia with the precise aim of making contact with the collection of photographs by Luigi

Naretti, which is kept there?

Aligned among other sixty binders full of images of the administrative life of the city, and

marked on the back with the number 29, the album that contains it seems to have fallen by

mistake, as a spurious legacy of some adventurous character unknown to his fellow citizens

because of a prolonged absence in distant places…

Here, then, is the place in Eritrea where Naretti decided to settle, Massawa.

Here are the characters: already known to us even by name, such as the imperial couple Regina

Taitùe Negus Menelik, or a little ‘lesser-known, as a proud ras Mangascià on horseback.

Here are the people that the photographer meets in the places frequented or following the progress

of the conquest in the direction of the whole, which are precisely the Abyssinian Players and

the Girls Beni-Amer: portraits that today we would call « ethnic » as if we were not also as

« ethnic » in their eyes.”[1]

Biblethiophile, 08.08.2026

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[1] PLANTUREUX (Serge, dir.), Biennale di Senigallia. A Traveller’s Companion for May 2019 Anteprima, Taccuini Maltagliati, S.C.B.S. – Servizi Centrali della Biennale di Senigallia, Senigallia, 2019.