Risarcimento. Per Non Dimenticare

Uffizi Galleries, The Uffizi

Florence | Italy

May 23, 2023 - Jun 18, 2023

Special exhibition on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Via dei Georgofili massacre.

On May 27, 1993, at 1:04 a.m., a car bomb exploded in Florence, in the heart of the city, on Via dei Georgofili, right next to the Uffizi. It was a Mafia bombing organized within that criminal strategy that shook Italy in 1992-1993. Five people died: Fabrizio Nencioni, Angela Fiume, with their daughters, Nadia, 9, and Caterina, a few days old, and Dario Capolicchio. Damage to the museum was also extensive, some paintings were shattered, and structures were seriously damaged. In the following days a wave of extraordinary solidarity rose against this heinous attack on one of the emblems of universal culture.

It was at that occasion that the collector Giuliano Gori, accepting the wish of the then museum director Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, and assisted by a specially constituted committee of experts, decided to launch a campaign of donations involving internationally renowned artists in order to "compensate" the artistic heritage so badly affected. Thanks to the many heartfelt responses to that appeal, within two years the museum was enriched with many works of extraordinary quality and heterogeneity. In February 1995, the Uffizi presented the new collection in a special exhibition. Sixty-two works were selected to be part of it, one for each artist: an important catalog accompanied the exhibition, published thanks to the generosity of the Olschki publishing house and edited, like the exhibition itself, by Stefania Gori.

Today, thirty years after the attack, the Uffizi symbolically brings back the same exhibition, composed of 62 graphic works donated by dozens of international artists, as a tribute to that generousity, as well as a renewed warning not to forget such a dramatic page in the history of the Uffizi and of Italy as a whole.