Opening the Sensible: Verona’s Manifesto of Inclusion

In Verona, the autumn of 2025 opens with a proposition that resists easy categorization: an exhibition that refuses the boundaries of expertise and privilege, insisting instead that beauty is not a commodity, nor an aesthetic category to be judged and ranked, but a right—an embodied experience accessible to all. Nessuno escluso. Linguaggi dell’opera e accesso al sensibile, curated by Cesare Pietroiusti and hosted across the historic venues of Fondazione Cariverona and UniCredit, positions itself as both exhibition and manifesto, inaugurating the Interregno cultural program with a gesture of radical inclusivity.

The exhibition brings together more than fifty works drawn from public and private collections, weaving a narrative that is less about chronology or stylistic coherence than about the possibility of encounter. Umberto Boccioni’s futurist visions converse with Giorgio Morandi’s meditative stillness; Alberto Viani’s sculptural purity collides with the raw mechanics of Arcangelo Sassolino; the participatory strategies of Kateřina Šedá and the imaginative cartographies of Claudia Losi unfold alongside the performative exuberance of Marcello Maloberti. At the same time, the quiet intimacy of Luigi Ghirri’s photography or the visionary marginality of Carlo Zinelli open unexpected doors onto the sensorial. Each work resists the role of a static object, emerging instead as a device—something porous, relational, charged with the capacity to generate reflection, imagination, and dialogue.

Yet what makes Nessuno escluso particularly distinctive is not only the constellation of names but the perspective of its curator. Pietroiusti, trained in psychiatry before devoting himself to artistic practice, has long been drawn to situations of paradox, marginality, and the overlooked. His contribution here is not limited to critical framing; his personal collection—formed over decades through exchanges, friendships, and shared contexts—enters into conversation with institutional holdings. This private archive, autobiographical and idiosyncratic, creates a counterpoint to the logic of the museum, questioning hierarchies of value and authority while revealing how a collection can also be a form of lived biography.

The exhibition is the first chapter of Interregno, an ambitious initiative conceived by Fondazione Cariverona with Urbs Picta, in collaboration with the University of Verona’s Museo del Contemporaneo and under the artistic direction of Jessica Bianchera. The title itself suggests suspension, a liminal time between orders, a space where belonging and otherness, memory and possibility, coexist without resolution. Through three major exhibitions and an expanded calendar of workshops, talks, and community programs, Interregno seeks to open the cultural fabric of the city to heterogeneous voices and publics. Here, accessibility is not an afterthought but the conceptual nucleus: entry is free, mediation is generous, and families, schools, and citizens are invited not to consume but to participate.

There is, within this framing, a quiet but forceful redefinition of what an exhibition can be. Pietroiusti himself notes that the true discovery lies in heterogeneity: the encounter among differences that might at first seem incompatible becomes not an obstacle but the very key to sensorial access. Beauty, in this sense, ceases to be a matter of taste or mastery and becomes instead a shared right, a space of common ground where identities can unfold in relation rather than in exclusion.

For Verona, the significance is double: on one hand, the exhibition affirms the city’s role as a stage where historical patrimony and contemporary experiment intersect and on the other, it situates art not as an elite domain but as an everyday field of possibility, where even the most intimate gestures can converse with the institutional. The implication is profound: if beauty is a right, then the structures of access must themselves become porous, welcoming, and open to contradiction.

Nessuno escluso is therefore not merely a gathering of works, but a cultural proposition. It stages art as democracy—fragile, heterogeneous, and alive—where no sensibility is excluded, and where the right to feel, to imagine, to think through forms, belongs to everyone.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved