The Städel in Frankfurt is showing “Italy in Mind – Photographs of Everlasting Places of Desire”. What is it about southern Europe that appeals to us so much?
In the Städel Frankfurt we can now wallow in wanderlust and at the same time get to the bottom of it with the help of photographs: Italy before your eyes – early photographs of eternal places of longing shows a total of 90 important photos from 1850 to 1880 along well-known routes with the stations Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples until September 3rd.
You can see pictures of Gorgio Sommer, the company of the Alinari brothers, Carlo Naya and Robert Macpherson, world-famous sights and cultural treasures are photographed, from the Canale Grande to St. Peter’s Basilica, from the Neptune fountain in Florence to the Gulf of Naples and the Adriatic coast, including the elegiac one Nature of southern European country. Many of the famous motifs became picture postcards, which significantly shaped and still shape our image of Italy in the late 19th century with the rise of tourism.
As the title suggests, the exhibition gets to the bottom of our longing for Italy. Not only the national poet and first tourist and travelogue author Goethe, who already saw his Arcadia in Italy in the 18th century, knows them. The author of these lines also knows them. Because while many of his schoolmates spent their summer holidays in Tuscany and on the campsites on the Italian Mediterranean coast in the 1980s with a view of Mount Vesuvius – he had to make do with the “Südstrand” campsite in Lübeck Bay near Pelzerhaken – with a view of the GDR coast near Kalkhorst in the Klützer Winkel …
Photo: Staedel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
The photographs in the Städel Frankfurt tell us about a time when pressing the shutter button defined what was worth seeing in the future. To this day we are all still longing for Italy – it is not for nothing that younger people in particular from foreign restaurants in Germany prefer Italian cuisine by a wide margin, as an opinion poll commissioned by the German Press Agency found out at the end of 2022. So there is no shortage of young people with a longing for Italy.
So let’s go to Frankfurt – and from there take the night train to Italy!
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