2024 marks the hundredth anniversary of the Italian writer Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996), whose work, long in the shadows, is now recognized as one of the most important in Italian literature, in particular through the posthumous success of her monumental The Art of Joy.

The IUZZA exhibition presents the research carried out by Italian photographer Francesca Todde (1981) in the footsteps of the novelist. Born in Catania, Sicily, to parents at the forefront of socialist, trade-unionist and anti-fascist activism, Goliarda Sapienza lived through the twentieth century as an activist, actor and writer. Few images survive of the vast novelistic landscape of her life and work, other than a few portraits of her, invariably adorning the covers of the various editions of her books. This led to the photographer’s idea of completing this scenery.

Travelling to the places where Goliarda Sapienza lived and accessing her archives, with the help of Angelo Pellegrino, the writer’s companion, Francesca Todde unfurls the panorama of the very personal imagery that Sapienza and Sicily inspired for her. Her photography is poetic rather than illustrative, capturing pictures left on the shores of the work, abruptly cast on volcanic rock or gently laid on the sands of Positano. Here we find the landscapes of Etna and the stuccoes of Catania’s Baroque palaces. We encounter flowers emerging from basalt, fossilized lava ripples, the amber eye of an octopus, the gaping skull of a dwarf elephant and, along with them, Cyclops and Titans and other resurgences of Sicily’s Greek mythological origins.

The entirety of Francesca Todde’s photographs, taken between 2017 and 2024, has been brought together in a thick little book published for the centenary: a sum of images like a sum of letters addressed to “Iuzza”, the writer’s childhood name.

The exhibition is the first installation of Francesca Todde’s book, published in 2024 to mark the centenary of Goliarda Sapienza’s birth.