Fifty years of Letizia Battaglia on display at the Baths of Caracalla – Rome

Roma – The arrest of boss Leoluca Bagarella gives way to a man killed on a bicycle, while the year was 1984 in Palermo. Two years earlier, judge Giovanni Falcone took part in the funeral of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, while the universe of childhood makes its way from Russia to Turkey through shots that follow the looks of a young and fragile existence.
These are some of Letizia Battaglia’s images that fully narrate an era, fully entering the history of photography.
Until November 5, the Baths of Caracalla are hosting a selection of 92 large-format photographs that retrace fifty years of the Sicilian photographer’s career, champion of civil rights, of the woman who with a Pentax K 1000 explores that heart of Palermo where wealth and poverty they coexist with resigned indifference.
Enter the alleys, Battaglia, makes his way into the districts, into the palaces of the aristocracy, he creates strong and sweet images, poetic and dramatic at the same time, which respectfully describe the social reality.

Letizia Battaglia, Graziella, Via Pindemonte, Psychiatric Hospital, Palermo, 1983 | Courtesy Electa

“Letizia Battaglia – explains Daniela Porro, Special Superintendent of Rome – represents an exemplary union between civil commitment, social feeling and artistic gaze. On the thirtieth anniversary of the attacks on San Giovanni in Laterano and San Giorgio al Velabro, the Superintendency is dedicating this exhibition to her, inaugurating two new rooms in the Baths of Caracalla for use, to demonstrate how her images tell an all-round story of an era, fully entering in the history of photography”.

Promoted by the Special Superintendency of Rome, organized by Electa in collaboration with the Letizia Battaglia Archive and the Falcone Foundation for the Arts, the exhibition, entitled Endless, as the curator Paolo Falcone explains, he wants to “compose a single, athematic, timeless and hierarchical work where iconic photographs, travel notes, daily life build an open narrative to get to know and discover the many aspects of Letizia Battaglia”.

Letizia Battaglia, Atatürk, Türkiye, 1984 | Courtesy Electa

Inside the archaeological area, the exhibition makes use of an installation that pays homage to the architect Lina Bo Bardi. To her we owe the exhibitors in tempered glass plates of the Museo de Arte de São Paulo, in Brazil. Of her. To his easels of 1968 the exhibition structures of the photographs of Letizia Battaglia are inspired.
Endless is a tribute to Letizia Battaglia, one of the main figures in the history of international photography, remembered above all for the courage she showed at the time of her collaboration with the newspaper Time of Palermo, and for those images taken during the bloody mafia war of the seventies and eighties.

The exhibition follows his way of breaking the mold with a single project, distributed over several spaces, where a wide selection of photographs tells the multiple ways of handling and making this art your own in a non-chronological and athematic way.
The visitor is invited to scrutinize the best-known images with which Battaglia delivers one of the most dramatic, poetic and poignant pages of Sicily to history. However, the itinerary also opens up to a universe of shots taken outside his homeland, stages of fundamental journeys useful for understanding the whole of his work and his thoughts.
Photography, news and private life thus come together in a single enthralling journey whose leitmotif is the extraordinary humanity of the Palermitan artist.

Letizia Battaglia, Utah, USA, 2019 | Courtesy Electa