fter all 115 photographs were finally ensconced on the walls of the Museo Italo Americano, assistant curator Bianca Friundi took a good look at what she’d help put in place.
“It was almost like a punch in the gut,” she said. “I was realizing how true the words of my parents and grandparents and the history books were. The power of these photographs was coming out. I didn’t know I would be that moved. It’s an exhibition about my country before, during and after the war.”
“NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932-1960” is a portrait of Italy through the eyes of 53 photographers. Organized in five chapters, it covers the Fascist era under dictator Benito Mussolini, the postwar rebuilding of a nation in ruins, the ascendancy of street photography, the explosion of cinematic narratives in print media, and the endless debates over what neorealism should or shouldn’t encompass.
“It’s more than an exhibition,” said Friundi, who grew up near Milan and moved to the United States seven years ago. “It’s an emotional experience.”
The images are haunting, and linger long after leaving the museum at Fort Mason: A pair of old men in a soup kitchen in 1946. Two children trudging through rubble in 1955. Female rice paddy workers in the Po Valley in 1958. Little boys in an orphanage, prostitutes in a Roman suburb, grime-covered miners in Sardinia. But there is also romance on the beach, cartwheels in a Venetian square, bicycling on an August day. Pride and resilience mix with poverty and squalor.
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“It gives us a hundred Italys,” said Enrica Viganò, the exhibition’s curator, who came to San Francisco from Milan to oversee the installation of the show that she began working on in 1998.
In the companion book that she put together, published in September, she wrote: “The vision of the photographers dealt with genuine people, real landscapes, collective stories that vibrated with skin and soul.”
The pictures span three decades, beginning from the period when the camera was employed as a propaganda tool to glorify fascism — a strategy that backfired when photographers produced images so real that they were eventually censored. Many photos document the lives of people throughout the country struggling in the aftermath of war.
“One thing that surprised me was the destruction and poverty all over Italy, not just the south,” said the Museo’s curator, Mary Serventi Steiner. “I did not expect to see that. And I was struck by the hope on people’s faces and how they resumed normal life after the war, with things like Sunday dances and bocce ball.”
Friundi said many visitors to the show are Italian immigrants or their descendants, who are still a strong presence in the Bay Area.
“They can really relate to this. They were there at that time, or their grandparents were,” she said. “And the current immigration topic is always in the background. A lot of people were leaving Italy then. Many people who are looking at the exhibit — you look at them and you can almost feel what they feel. It’s really a reality show.”
Friundi mentioned a 1953 photograph of three generations of women in a Sicilian family, scrutinizing a letter that only the youngest could read. It was from her father, who had left for America. They were hoping to soon follow. In another picture, a crowd in Genoa was seeing off the passenger ship Cristoforo Colombo.
“Some of our visitors emigrated on a boat,” said Steiner, whose grandparents came to the United States from Liguria. “They look at that and say, ‘That was me.’ And they look at the postwar conditions in Italy, particularly the poverty and the reconstruction — that was their motivation for leaving. The show really strikes a chord for so many people on so many levels.”
She added, “Another timely message for me in the show is the importance of photojournalism in communicating to people. Photography has a way of showing reality without words and making an impression.”
The exhibition opened June 26 and runs through Sept. 15 at the Museo, a place that is a San Francisco rarity: Admission is always free. The show has toured several cities in Europe, including Madrid, Zurich and Verona, and it had a three-month run in New York last year. Besides photos, there are illustrated magazines, video collages and movie posters of well-known neorealist films, including “Bicycle Thieves,” “Stromboli” and “Rome, Open City.”
The show is one of the most significant and ambitious the Museo has done since it was founded in 1978. Part of the challenge lies in the subject matter itself.
“Neorealism is difficult to define,” filmmaker Martin Scorsese wrote in a foreword to Viganò’s book. “It is an impulse. It is a moment. It is an act of recovery and restoration. It is a source of inspiration, a fountain that never stops flowing.”
Steiner fully agreed. “I would not argue with Martin Scorsese,” she said.
“NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932-1960” is on view at the Museo Italo Americano at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco through Sept. 15. The museum is open Tuesdays-Sundays from noon to 4 p.m. Admission is free.
