ReportingExpensive, uncomfortable and quite inaccessible, the few rooms of the prestigious Académie de France in Rome are nevertheless unique places. Like the Renaissance palace that the photographer François Halard wanted to rediscover.
This scene is never more fascinating than when the curtain is drawn. Outside opening hours, you cannot enter the Villa Medici with your head held high. You have to slip through a heavy and tiny door, barely over five feet high and not very wide, to pass the threshold.
So the effect is only more spectacular: we bow, we take a step forward and, in the blink of an eye, silence is silenced. In front of us, a monumental staircase lit by “maids”, these theater lamps which remain perpetually on, even when the room is plunged into darkness. After two flights of stairs, we continue the ascent by engaging in a spiral staircase, leading to the lounges and the loggia, which opens onto Italian gardens and a park of seven hectares, perfectly ordered.
Further on, away from places open to visitors, we will find the workshops in which the sixteen boarders housed by the Académie de France in Rome, young artists from all disciplines, who have won, after a ruthless selection, the privilege of living for a year in this unique setting.
Softness and harmony
On the city side, the Villa Medici displays the somewhat intimidating exterior of a Renaissance palace overlooking the historic center of Rome, on the Pincio hill. But once you reach the gardens, the impression is quite different. Seen from the loggia, in fact, the Villa is only softness and harmony.
It has a tails side and a tails side, and this duality is found at all levels. Like Schrödinger’s cat, both dead and alive in a famous intellectual experiment in quantum physics, it is a place both open and closed, anchored in heritage and dedicated to creation, conducive to work and ideal for contemplation.
Guided group tours of part of the Villa and the gardens are organized throughout the day, and the daily life of the Villa is punctuated by specific events open to the public. Until February 2022, in the gardens, an exhibition by the English photographer Martin Parr and the magazine is presented ToiletPaper, co-founded by contemporary Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.
But, there again, the balance is fragile: that the institution opens too much, and the artists could not create any more under the best conditions. Thus, the Villa Medici would cut itself off from its primary vocation. Let it close in on its secrets, and that would only increase the caricature of a place cut off from the world and populated by the privileged.
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