Sergio Vacchi. Mediterranean Dream

2025 marks the centennial of Sergio Vacchi (1925-2016) and the sixtieth anniversary of his Parthenopean debut.

This installation is an opportunity to revisit the career of an artist who, in Naples, underwent one of his most crucial artistic breakthroughs.  

1965 was a pivotal year for Vacchi and innovations in Neapolitan art.

At the Galleria Il Cento (then on Via dei Mille, 61), the artist exhibited Adam and Eve in Italy, a cycle that established his return to the figurative with “stage-landscapes” and recurring personal symbols that evoke hermetic poetry.

Over the same year, with Marcello Rumma actively promoting contemporary art and Lucio Amelio opening the Modern Art Agency, Naples progressed from the long hegemony of the nineteenth century into an international center for contemporary art.

Vacchi fit perfectly into this new climate ready to welcome such a cultured, visionary, and existential painter.  

This extraordinary period saw the meeting of two exceptional collectors, Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren, who assembled one of the most important collections of twentieth-century art in Europe.

The Neapolitan exhibition of 1965 included many studies of Vacchi’s Vatican Council II from the Ponti-Loren collection, and shortly afterward the famous couple bought the Death of Federico II of Hohenstaufen – Italian Nocturne (1966), a monumental painting at least four meters in length.

The Federico II cycle – symbolizing the allure of southern Italy – includes The Marble Phone Call exhibited here, which perfectly captures its hermetic and fantastic spirit.

Even in 1987, Sophia Loren was photographed in her Florida home under her portrait by Sergio Vacchi.

This exhibition commemorates the extraordinary year of 1965, when a strong sense of departure was shaped by a vision of Naples as a city that opens, takes risks, and innovates.

It also presents to the public, for the first time, a selection of Vacchi’s works from the following decades, demonstrating the cohesion and ingenuity of one of the most original Italian artists from the second half of the twentieth century: an authentic poet of images.

The exibition Sergio Vacchi Mediterranean Dream