How many things can be hidden in the folds of your toga? Treasure all the anecdotes, curiosities and insights collected in this column, carry them "in your pocket" and, if necessary, take them out to amaze everyone with your knowledge!

In the Folds of the Toga

No rules, just one truth: art is for everyone! 
Join our art club and satiate your hunger for culture, (but be careful, it could cause Independence)!

Art Without Rules

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Hidden artworks in Disney classics

Charm and magic intertwine in this wind-kissed land, where breezes and currents are enclosed in caves and quarries, if necessary released or controlled by their sovereign god. The homeland of Aeolus, where Ulysses found refreshment and a friendly ear, welcomes you!

Grand Tour is the space dedicated to adventurers. Whether you are looking for unique locations to visit, places to savor the local gastronomy or advice for a family-sized holiday, this section is for you!

Grand Tour

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Lipari in 3 days

Lipari is the largest of the seven islands that make up the Aeolian archipelago. From a tourist point of view, it is the richest in offer while maintaining a very peaceful atmosphere and suitable for any type of tourist. Rich in history thanks to the museum that stands on the rhyolitic rock of the "Castello" of Lipari: an imposing dome of volcanic formation with characteristics of a natural fortress, but also of gastronomic and craft traditions that fill the historic streets of the center with small shops and shops of local crafts. What are you waiting for? Come and discover it!


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What to see in Lipari

Lipari

**Aeolian Islands: a journey to the roots of Mediterranean civilisation**

The **Regional Pole of the Aeolian Islands** for cultural sites, with the **Archaeological Park** and the **Luigi Bernabò Brea Museum**, is based in the **Fortress of Lipari** (now Lipari Castle) - a natural fortress that has protected the inhabitants with its inaccessibility since prehistoric times. This geographic position has opened the way to continuous cultural succession: the Fortress has been inhabited since Neolithic times, becoming an Acropolis in the Greco-Roman period and a fortified citadel later. 

**The Luigi Bernabò Brea Archaeological Museum**

It is precisely this temporal layering that is illustrated in the rooms of the **Luigi Bernabò Brea Museum**, named after the creator of the Regional Archaeological Museum.

The tour begins with the history of the museum and the digs carried out on the **Aeolian Islands**. Here the cultural evolution from the Neolithic Age to the Final Bronze Age is documented.

**Prehistory**

A subsequent pavilion presents finds from the **prehistory of Lipari and the smaller islands**. Thanks to the mining and processing of obsidian (black volcanic glass), the population was stable from the middle of the 6th millennium B.C. onwards, allowing the development of an advanced civilisation, which built stone villages and had regular contacts with Mycenae. 

One section of the exhibits is dedicated to the founding of Greek Lipara in the 6th century B.C.: artefacts from the Acropolis of Lipari are collected here - in particular objects found in the votive well of Aeolus and in the settlement on the slopes of the Fortress.

**The Greek-Roman Age**

The section devoted to the Greco-Roman period displays the wealth of material (vases of various forms, personal objects, statuettes, masks, jewellery) from the burial objects found in the necropolis of contrada Diana on Lipari, where about three thousand tombs were discovered. The garden with adjoining epigraphic pavilion also preserves funerary stelae and headstones found in the necropolis, with inscriptions from the Greco-Roman period. 
One room of the museum is dedicated to underwater archaeology, displaying hundreds of artefacts (amphorae, anchors, vases, cannons) found in wrecks on the seabed of the Aeolian Islands. 

**Volcanoes as an economic resource**

The Volcanology pavilion is introduced by a section that explores the relationship between humans and the land in antiquity, showing in particular the uses of volcanic products (obsidian, pumice, sulphur, alum, sulphurous water). Panels, models, maps and photographs illustrate the history of the volcanoes; samples of local rocks present the geomorphological features of the Aeolian Islands. 

**The Mare Motus contemporary art collection**

In more recent times, the Castle of Lipari was a penal colony, and then a place for the confinement of dissident intellectuals, politicians and artists. The area of the former Castle Prisons now houses the core of the **Mare Motus permanent collection of contemporary art**, with many site-specific works inspired by the prison theme. 

The space of the former **St Catherine's** church is used for temporary exhibitions.


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Aeolian Islands Archaeological Park

 Luigi Bernabò Brea Archaeological Museum

A FORTRESS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEA WITH SEVEN THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY BEHIND IT

Seven islands of volcanic origin (Lipari, Salina, Vulcano, Alicudi, Filicudi, Stromboli and Panarea) where the first human settlements date back to the fifth millennium BC. The objects and events of Aeolian civilisation from its origins to the Norman period in the extraordinary Luigi Bernabò Brea Museum on Lipari.


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Museum

Through the experimentation of color and matter, the works of Alessandra Giovannoni and Tahar Ben Jelloun offer the visitor a path that is a modern reflection on the looming destiny of today's world.


Tahar Ben Jelloun and Alessandra Giovannoni are one again inside the rooms of **Luigi Bernabò Brea Museum**.
The exhibition, curated by Giovanna De Feo, encapsulate a deep understanding of the modernity hovering on the isle, creating a narrative that on one hand pay tribute to the figure of a young hero of our times, the judge Livatino, killed by mafia, on the other hand delineate the drama of the refugees disembarking on Sicily’ shores. 
 
Among the most famous names of francophone’s literature, **Tahar Ben Jelloun** is known internationally for his poetic production. He dedicated himself to painting only at a later time, and he’s defined as the painter of light and joy. In his paintings Jelloun transforms **poetry in material and lively colors**, bringing to life atmospheres and suggestions from the arabic world, recreating landscapes of his childhood through an abstractism that morph arabic calligraphy  into signs with which he gives life to canvas. 

If Jelloun’s painting is a form of writing, the works by **Alessandra Giovannoni** distinguish themself for their scenographic aspect. With an elongated cut and considerable dimensions, Giovannoni’s canvas are recognizable for the **clean cut of the landscape** in the top part of the composition, giving a sense of not finishing where colors seem sometimes blurred and light creates a reverb, as if you were looking at the painting foreshortened, squinting because of the sun. 

Through the **experimentation of color and matter**, the works of the two artists, already part of the permanent collection of the contemporary wing of the Museum, offer the visitor a path that is a modern reflection on the looming destiny and on the tangible contrasts of today's world.

This is a reality that invests the most complex and extraordinary island in the Mediterranean, told by a poet-painter and a painter among the most interesting exponents of the New Roman School.


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Alessandra Giovannoni and Tahar Ben Jelloun

Exhibition

The exhibition, based on an idea by Lorenzo Zichichi, is produced by "Il Cigno GG Edizioni" in collaboration with the Archaeological Park of the Aeolian Islands directed by Rosario Vilardo.


“Imagining Islands” is the name of the exhibition by Gavazzeni Ricordi and Claudio Koporossy at the Luigi Bernabò Brea Archaeological Park on Lipari.

In the recurring dialogue between contemporary art and the magnificent finds and sites of the Bernabò Brea Archaeological Museum, we present an exhibition by two great masters of contemporary photography: Carlo Gavazzeni Ricordi and Claudio Koporossy.

The former contrasts ancient images with those of everyday life in our present circumstances. The latter, who describes himself as 'obsessed with water', by contrast captures in his snapshots the movements of his favourite element that are impossible to perceive with the naked eye.

The works of both fit in perfectly with the intention, initiated on Lipari in 2015 with the transformation of the prisons into 'cells' for contemporary art, to create a dialogue between the spectacular finds from the waters of the Aeolian Islands, kept in the Lipari Museum, and contemporary art.


What to see in Lipari

Lipari

Lipari

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