Zevi at MAXXI, an Italian counter-story

Among the projects on display – all created by 38 of the architects supported by Zevi – the Bridge over the Basento made in Potenza between '67 and '76 by Sergio Musmeci, the Venezuelan Pavilion at the Biennale of '53 by Carlo Scarpa, themultifunctional buildingand in via Campania in Rome by Lucio Passarelli, the Burgo paper mill of Mantua by Pier Luigi Nervi, the Monument to the martyrs of the Fosse Ardeatine by Mario Fiorentino or the Church on the Highway by Giovanni Michelucci. All well-known works and lives on after many years.

But who was Bruno Zevi (1918-2000) and what he represented, to whom the exhibition is dedicated “Zevi's architects. History and counter-history of Italian architecture 1944-2000"? The title steals the words from one of the fundamental volumes written by the architect-teacher and free thinker. And it immediately makes us understand his original, unconventional gaze on reality; counter-history as a refusal of every cage and every ideology. “Never boxes!” Zevi said to anyone who interviewed or asked him. No box, architecture as space, no predefined cages or boxes or cubes but, on the contrary, getting out of categories, visual habits, labels.

A contemporary teaching to which the exhibition curated by Pippo Ciorra and Jean-Louis Cohen and created with the Zevi Foundation now pays homage. "A dutiful tribute to a great intellectual" and his "stubborn defense of liberal-democratic values", says Giovanna Melandri, president of the Maxxi Foundation, who "sheds a different light on the history of architecture".

To find out more (tickets, timetables, openings, etc), this is the link of the exhibition at the Maxxi Museum.

Image: Bruno Zevi © Elisabetta Catalano