Florence the unique identity of Santa Croce dialogues with contemporaneity through “Genius Loci”, a festival whose fifth edition will take place from 20 to 24 September. The event enhances the extraordinary cultural heritage of which the monumental complex of Santa Croce is the casket and once again creates a bridge between memory and the future through the languages of music, culture and art declined in a place of millennial charm.
In a dimension of amazement and discovery, the artists involved in the project will accompany the public and visitors in the unique experience of living and living the monumental complex in a new and original way. Among the protagonists of the new edition, Angelo Branduardi, Markus Stockhausen, Petra Magoni and Wim Mertens, protagonists of exclusive Italian productions.
The initiative is organized by the cultural association Controradio Club, Opera di Santa Croce and Controradio, in collaboration with the cultural association La Nottola Di Minerva. The project is one of the fifteen major exhibitions and festivals of the Florentine Summer of the Municipality of Florence and has the contribution of the Metropolitan City of Florence. “Genius Loci, discovering Santa Croce” represents a unicum in the Italian panorama, in which the temporary nature of the festival is combined with a long-term cultural strategy that aims to enhance an exceptional cultural heritage.
Great names in music and culture will read and reinterpret the spirit of the place through performances, talks and concerts. Between the Basilica, the Cenacle and the Great Cloister artists, intellectuals and writers will meet with site specific events, in a context where they find a synthesis of spirituality and beauty, memory and history, past and future.
Consistent with this approach, “epiphany / apparition” was chosen as the central theme for 2022, which recalls the desire to return to experience the relationship with art with wonder and emotion and at the same time the next celebration (2023) of the eight hundred years from the living nativity scene of Greccio wanted by Francis of Assisi to make everyone understand the mystery of Christianity.
The Genius Loci program
Angelo Branduardi will perform pieces from the album “L’infinamente piccolo”, dedicated to the story of St. Francis of Assisi, in an intimate performance for voice and violin, accompanied by a grand piano, which will be exceptionally welcomed right inside the largest Franciscan basilica in the world (20/09).
One of the greatest living trumpet players, Markus Stockhausen, in a trio with Lino Capra Vaccina and Alireza Motazevi, will face the metaphor of time through music, in a reflection on the abstract value of the future and on the most painful one linked to the past (22/09). Also noteworthy is Petra Magoni and the lutenist Ilaria Fantin in the show “What are the Clouds”: a musical itinerary from 1500 to today with ancient and contemporary notes, adapted to the archlute and other ancient instruments and interpreted by the splendid voice of Magoni (22 / 09). Linda Messerklinger and Luca Vicini – aka “Vicio” of Subsonica – will be the protagonists of “Anima-L”, a project of cooperation between art, science and activism to revitalize human communion with the environment that surrounds us (22/09) . The closing of the festival will be entrusted to Wim Mertens, one of the major architects of minimalism, ambient and musical avant-garde of the twentieth century, author of soundtracks for Peter Greenaway’s films and Jan Fabre’s plays, who at lights of dawn will bring his “Santa Croce project – piano solo” (24/09) to the Great Cloister.
A talk with the historian Alessandro Vanoli is scheduled starting from his publication “The Tale of the Seasons: the revelation and the time of return” (Il Mulino). It will be a literary, historical and artistic journey in memory of Chiara Frugoni, who recently passed away, a great protagonist of the iconographic research on Francis of Assisi, deeply linked to Santa Croce and Genius Loci (23/09). Do not miss the performance between words and music “The epiphany in Nature and the epiphany of Nature”, with the writers Ilaria Gaspari and Antonio Pascale, accompanied by the voice of the singer-songwriter Letizia Fuochi (22/09), and the conversation at several voices with the medieval history professor Franco Cardini on the theme “the epiphany of the divine”, on the trail of his essay “The abodes of God. Where the Eternal dwells” (Il Mulino): if God does not need a fixed abode man has always had the need to establish a place in which to meet him; hence an excursus on how God proposed himself in the works of man, in architectural forms that are often lost or misunderstood, for a dramatic and intense journey towards the places of the eternal on a human scale.
Free admission subject to availability, with reservations required.
Genius Loci returns to Santa Croce: art and music between memory and the future