What remains of a poet when time has fixed his works in a seemingly definitive form? In the case of Mario Luzi, one of the most prominent and complex voices of 20th-century Italy, what remains is a collection of papers, notes, notebooks, and diaries. These materials are fragile and often invisible to the general public, but they are crucial to understanding the genesis of a body of work that spanned the century.
This insight gave rise to the exhibition “Nel bagaglio di Mario… Gli scartafacci luziani del Gabinetto Vieusseux” (In Mario’s luggage… Luzi’s scraps from the Gabinetto Vieusseux), hosted from January 21 to February 27, 2026, at the Archivio Contemporaneo Bonsanti del Gabinetto Vieusseux, in Via Maggio 42, Florence.
Curated by Simone Magherini, Riccardo Sturaro, and Stefano Verdino, the exhibition invites visitors to enter Luzi’s creative laboratory, focusing on the materials preserved in the Luzi Fund of the Bonsanti Archive. Not a celebratory tribute, but a close-up investigation into the making of poetry.
How a poem is born
The first section of the exhibition addresses a question that is as elementary as it is crucial: how is a poem born? Through notebooks, notepads, and loose sheets of paper, the exhibition reconstructs Mario Luzi’s creative process, from the first annotation to publication. What emerges is a long and complex work, made up of rewritings, variations, and continuous corrections.
For Luzi, poetry is never a sudden epiphany, but the result of a constant striving towards a form that always remains provisional. The ‘scartafacci’ thus become concrete evidence of a thought in motion, of a writing that is constructed through successive layers, without shortcuts.
The writer and the man
But Luzi’s notebooks do not only tell the story of the poet at work. The second part of the exhibition strongly highlights the author’s human and civic dimension. The pages reveal traces of a continuous dialogue with the world: art, spirituality, ethical commitment, reflections on justice and peace.
Friendships and affinities also emerge, tracing a broad and unexpected cultural map. Among these is his friendship with Fabrizio De André, described by Luzi as an ‘artist of chanson’, a sign of a sensitivity capable of recognizing poetry even outside the confines of academic literature. The notebooks thus become a meeting place between life and writing, between personal experience and intellectual responsibility.
Unpublished poems
The most surprising part of the exhibition is the third section, dedicated to the presentation, for the first time ever, of six unpublished poems by Mario Luzi. Composed in his notebooks and never published, these poems were identified by Riccardo Sturaro during his doctoral research.
Each text is displayed in autograph form, accompanied by a transcription and a presentation that clarifies the occasion of its creation. This is a discovery of great importance, not only for scholars but for anyone who wants to approach a work that, years later, continues to reveal new depths.
The role of the Archive
Throughout the exhibition, the role of the Archive emerges clearly. As the curators point out, the Archive is not simply a repository of memory, but a living resource, capable of generating new perspectives for study and, at times, completing an author’s work.
In this sense, the Bonsanti Contemporary Archive of the Gabinetto Vieusseux confirms its status as a central location for Italian culture, a space where conservation is intertwined with research and dissemination, making a heritage of extraordinary value accessible.
Portraits, books, objects
Accompanying the archival materials is a rich series of portraits of Mario Luzi created by artists and photographers such as Adriana Pincherle, Silvano Campeggi, Quinto Martini, and Mario Francesconi. The images help to convey the complexity of a figure who lived through the 20th century, always maintaining a vigilant and questioning gaze.
The exhibition also includes a selection of Luzi’s books dedicated to friends and interlocutors such as Carlo Betocchi, Vasco Pratolini, and Ottone Rosai, testimony to a dense network of intellectual dialogue. The exhibition concludes with Luzi’s famous Olivetti typewriter, on loan from the Centro Studi La barca di Pienza: a symbolic object that brings poetry back to a concrete, everyday dimension.
A legacy that speaks to the present
Nel bagaglio di Mario is not just an exhibition about Mario Luzi, but an invitation to look at poetry in its making, in its fragility and in its strength. It is a rare opportunity to come into contact with what usually remains hidden: the drafts, the attempts, the working papers.
Open to the public free of charge upon reservation, the exhibition offers visitors the chance to rediscover a great author through his most intimate belongings. Belongings that, even today, continue to speak to our times.
