Press release January 24th 2020

The Letizia Battaglia exhibition, Storie di Strada, set up at Palazzo Reale, ended on Sunday 19 January 2020 with an extraordinary result: over 22,000 visitors in just 46 exhibition days, with a daily average of around 500 visitors and peaks on weekends and last dates of over 1000 attendance. Since the inaugural day, and throughout the opening period, the exhibition has met great public success, with a very remarkable presence of young people, who evidently recognize themselves in the shots of the Sicilian photographer and a great success of the catalogue (about 1,200 copies were sold at the bookshop, as well as other 260 publications dedicated to the work of Letizia Battaglia).

With about 300 photographs, many of which unpublished, "Storie di strada" crosses the entire professional life of the Sicilian photographer, and develops along an articulated narrative path built on different chapters and themes. The portraits of women, men or animals, or children, are just some chapters that make up the review; to these are added those on cities such as Palermo, and therefore on politics, life, death and love, and two videos that deepen his human and artistic history. The exhibition path focuses on the topics that built the most characteristic expressive figure of the artist, which led her to make a profound and continuous social criticism, avoiding commonplaces and questioning the visual assumptions of contemporary culture. What results is a true portrait, that of an intellectual against the current, but also a poetic and political photographer, a woman who is interested in what surrounds her and in what, far from her, intrigues her. Promoted by the Municipality of Milan, Palazzo Reale and Civita Exhibitions and Museums, the exhibition anticipated the "The talents of women" program, promoted and coordinated by the Department of Culture, which will propose throughout 2020 multidisciplinary initiatives - from visual arts to fashion and science - dedicated to women protagonists in culture and creative thinking.