Leonardo Parlante: Milan Becomes the Open Book of Leonardo’s Lost Words

Milan turns into a living dictionary and an open-air museum with Leonardo Parlante, the exhibition conceived and curated by artist and researcher Sabrina D’Alessandro (URPS – Ufficio Resurrezione Parole Smarrite).

Sabrina D'Alessandro URPS, Leonardo Parlante, Vanagroria e Purità 2025, installazione, Courtesy the artist and Casa degli Artisti, ph. ©Filippo Romano

The project, co-produced with Casa degli Artisti, runs from 1 November 2025 to 31 January 2026, unfolding between the Castello Sforzesco and the city’s public billboards, transforming streets and courtyards into pages of a rediscovered lexicon.

The opening will take place on Thursday, 13 November 2025 at 4:30 PM in the Weil Weiss Hall of the Castello Sforzesco, as part of the BookCity Milano 2025 programme. The project transforms the city into a vast open-air manuscript, bringing back to life a selection of words drawn from the Codex Trivulzianus 2162, the celebrated lexical collection in which Leonardo transcribed, studied and catalogued nearly 8,000 terms, now preserved at the Trivulziana Library of Castello Sforzesco.

In the Cortile delle Armi, the terracotta sculpture Salvatica offers a new reading of the term salvatico: not “wild”, but “that which is saved,” according to Leonardo’s own interpretation. The work houses pairs of opposing words engraved in the clay, reflecting on the fragile balance of human qualities. In the Corte Ducale, two symbolically complementary sculptures face one another: Vanagroria, a mirrored steel totem that evokes the fragile illusion of the ego, and Purità, a terracotta form inspired by Leonardo’s notes on elephants that ritually bathe in running water, an allegory of regeneration and integrity.

Sabrina D'Alessandro URPS, Leonardo Parlante, Salvatica 2025, installazione, Courtesy the artist and Casa degli Artisti

Beyond the castle’s walls, Milan becomes a written page. Public posters displayed across the city’s municipal billposting spaces juxtapose lemmas from the Codex with excerpts from other Leonardian manuscripts, prompting short meditations on knowledge, experience, freedom, fullness, and the harmony of opposites. Each street becomes a threshold of thought, each word an invitation to rediscover the world.

Winner of the AAA – Atelier Aperti per Artista 2024 open call by Casa degli Artisti, the project led to an artist residency, production support, and new acquisitions for MUNAF – Museo Nazionale di Fotografia. The work will continue internationally throughout 2025, including a presentation at the Italian Cultural Institute in Oslo on the occasion of the Week of the Italian Language in the World.

Sabrina D’Alessandro, founder of URPS – Ufficio Resurrezione Parole Smarrite (Office for the Resurrection of Lost Words), transforms rare and forgotten terms into sculptures, installations, performances and public art projects. Her work, which merges lexicographic research with visual practice, has been exhibited in Italian and international institutions (including MUNAF – Museo Nazionale di Fotografia, Museo CAMeC, and Art Sonje Center Seoul) and has drawn the attention of the Treccani Encyclopedia.

Sabrina D'Alessandro URPS URPS, Leonardo Parlante, supèrchi 2025, affissione pubblica, Courtesy the artist and Casa degli Artisti

With Leonardo Parlante, URPS’s decade-long mission expands: to pull words from silence, return them to the public sphere, and restore them as symbols, images, and living thought. In Milan, Leonardo’s notebook finally speaks again — out loud.

Milano, Castello Sforzesco, Cortile delle Armi e Corte Ducale

Mostra diffusa: affissioni urbane nella città di Milano

Date

3 novembre 2025 - 31 gennaio 2026

Ardent Is the Passage. Matter and Memory at the Fortezza Nuova in Livorno

From November 9, 2025, to January 10, 2026, the Sala del Forno at the Fortezza Nuova in Livorno hosts Ardent Is the Passage, a group exhibition by Noemi Mirata, Giampaolo Parrilla, and Redusa, curated by Bianca Basile and produced by Forno Project.

Detail Parrilla

Three young artists — from Catania, Bologna, and Naples — intertwine their individual practices around a shared vision: matter as an emotional archive, a living organism, and a field of transformation.

The title Ardent Is the Passage evokes both a physical and symbolic crossing. The exhibition is conceived not as a simple display of individual works but as a fluid environment where salt, wax, and pigment act as ritual elements in a collective geography of sensations. Salt preserves and corrodes, wax protects and yields, heat burns and regenerates — forces in tension that reveal the fragility and resilience of form.

Curator Bianca Basile imagines the exhibition as a space of transition rather than contemplation: a place where the artwork exposes its own vulnerability and the material becomes a vessel for care. “The artistic gesture,” Basile explains, “does not conceal the wound, but reveals it as a threshold — as a possibility for rebirth.”

Noemi Mirata’s installations and paintings explore natural metamorphosis, combining organic matter, memory, and botanical imagery. Her works evoke processes of transformation and impermanence, where the material becomes a metaphor for survival and renewal.

Giampaolo Parrilla blends painting with geopolitical documentation, reclaiming the symbolic potential of conflict imagery. His canvases and drawings do not narrate war itself but the psychic echo it leaves behind — fragments of collective memory suspended between data, myth, and emotion.

Redusa (Rebecca Miccio) works at the intersection of protection and decay, sculpting wax, salt, and iron into fragile yet resistant forms. Her works embody a ritual gesture, one that consumes itself even as it seeks to endure.

Detail Mirata

In the interplay between destruction and regeneration, Ardent Is the Passage becomes a meditation on time, trauma, and persistence. The exhibition invites viewers to dwell within the wound — to inhabit it as a site of passage, knowledge, and transformation.

Detail Parrilla

What emerges is the image of a new generation of artists who confront pain not as spectacle but as shared language. Through salt, wax, and pigment, they shape an art that burns quietly, holding within it the fragile beauty of what refuses to disappear.

Fortezza Nuova, Livorno

Scali della Fortezza Nuova, 4

Date

8 novembre 2025 - 10 gennaio 2026

Matt Mullican. That Person’s Heaven at Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo

From November 14, 2025, to January 18, 2026, the historic Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo hosts That Person’s Heaven, a major solo exhibition by Matt Mullican, curated by Stefano Raimondi and produced by The Blank Contemporary Art.

That Person's Heaven, Matt Mullican

Free and open to the public, the show inaugurates the 15th edition of the ArtDate Contemporary Art Festival, supported by Regione Lombardia and the Municipality of Bergamo, marking the return to Italy of one of the most influential contemporary artists after his 2018 retrospective at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.

Since the 1970s, Matt Mullican (born in Santa Monica in 1951, living and working in New York and Berlin) has developed a complex system of symbols, pictograms, and color codes that map the structures of human knowledge and experience. In this chromatic cosmology, green represents material reality, blue everyday life, yellow ideas, red subjectivity, and black and white language itself. This visual grammar has become the artist’s method for shaping a personal universe—a conceptual grid through which to interpret existence.

The exhibition title refers to That Person, an alter ego that Mullican embodies under hypnosis, a persona that acts and speaks independently from the artist, expressing an unfiltered, at times childlike consciousness. The new large-scale installation on view in Bergamo was created entirely in a hypnotic state: a monumental 16x16 meter grid made up of thirty-two equal panels, half in black and white, half in red.

Produced in collaboration with Aquafil S.p.A. and Radici Pietro Industries & Brands S.p.A., both leaders in sustainable textile innovation, the work merges artistic exploration and advanced industrial processes. Here, the rational order of the grid meets the unpredictability of trance, generating a conceptual tension between structure and chaos.

Hypnosis becomes a tool for exploring altered states of consciousness, while silence—the central theme of ArtDate 2025—emerges not as emptiness but as a structural element that amplifies introspection and perception.

Matt Mullican

As Mullican explains: “Everything is in the mind. All images are mental. The black-and-white side is painted by that person; it’s about daily emotions and actions we don’t remember. The red side is about heaven, God, demons, and angels—different parts of the same story.”

In That Person’s Heaven, the artist turns inward, using the hypnotic state as a metaphor for artistic creation itself: an act of surrender to the unconscious, where meaning surfaces through images and gesture rather than intention.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Silvana Editoriale, with essays by Stefano Raimondi and Roberta Tenconi, and by a program of free educational workshops for children, curated by The Blank’s educational department.

Matt Mullican

With That Person’s Heaven, Mullican reaffirms art’s power to bridge the conscious and the unseen, transforming silence into a field of revelation.

Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo

Piazza Vecchia, 8A

Date

14 novembre 2025 - 18 gennaio 2026