Ritrovi (Find Yourself): A Photographic Project of Rome
April 16 - June 5, 2026
511 Gallery is pleased to present Ritrovi (Find Yourself): A Photographic Project of Rome, an exhibition of color panoramic prints of Romans and their neighborhoods – indoors and outdoors – by the Italian artist, Patrizia Bonanzinga, in collaboration with Pietro Mari, also an Italian photographer*.
“Simply coming to Rome cannot be half so complex as coming back” wrote the Anglo-Irish writer, Elizabeth Bowen. Ritrovi (Find Yourself) is about time and place and finding yourself, or two separate selves within you, in the same place at the same time, both then and now – a concept that is not possible in real life but rather only through memory, and, in this case particularly, through photographic film.
Bar Necci, Pigneto, Roma 2001
Patrizia Bonanzinga had resided in Rome in the 1980s, then returned to the city in 1998, after living and working abroad for over a decade. The Rome she found was one that was both familiar and yet differed greatly from the city she had known before. Rome is like that, an “eternal city”to which “all roads lead”, and whose history is constantly and inseparably being layered with its contemporary presence. It is both old and new at the same time, often at the same moment in time, to both visitor and returning native. To regain her place and sense of place in her old but new Rome, the artist began taking pictures.
Pigneto (“the pine grove”) once an unorganized rural settlement is a quartieri urbani (a quarter, that is a district not built on one of Rome’s seven hills), a neighborhood on the eastern edge of Rome that dates back to the 1600s, when it was a leafy suburb of villas, vineyards, and pine trees. By the time of Italy’s Reunification in 1861, however, Pigneto had begun industrializing,
and was soon founded as a community of industrial workers “on the other side of the tracks” (later to be immortalized by cinema directors Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini). In the twentieth century, its streets and residents survived the bombings of World War II, the anti-Facist resistance and left-wing demonstrations in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but then lapsed into a district challenged by narcotics and crime. At the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, as Rome entered a new era, opening up to tourism and a rising reputation as a city of film, fashion and La Dolce Vita, Pigneto began a process of regentrification, while still relying on its working-class origins and low-key mood and character to carry it into a new model of Roman diverseness and change, balancing the ancient with the post-modern as the twenty-first century awaited. It was at the turning-point in the quarter’s history that Patrizia Bonanzinga delved into Pigneto’s daily life.
Bar Necci, Pigneto, Roma 2001 is a polyptych of four interior scenes in the same place and, ostensibly, at the same time, of middle-aged and older men in a neighborhood bar and restaurant in the Pigneto quarter that has been there since 1924. The four scenes of the story are visually cohered by a green, square-tiled wall that serves as the backdrop to each separate segment of the photograph and its narrative.
Termini, la Stazione, Roma 2005
In the first scene, three men are playing billiards, though to our eyes it seems that only two are actually shooting, the third, hands in his pockets, leaning against the wall in passive observation. The man closest to us is little more than a tall blur, either about to shoot or having just shot his ball into the near corner pocket. A second player, with cue in hand, is ready to play next, but the action seems to have stopped, and the three men seem to have little connection with each other beyond their being in the same room at the same time.
By contrast, the second scene is a convivial one, occurring in what is clearly the drinking area of the bar: Four men, two seated at table and two standing, are all decidedly focused on the table and what is transpiring there, to which action we are not privy, rather are distanced viewers.
The third scene visually and photographically spills over into a fourth, as a man seated at a card table in the card room, reading his newspaper with great interest is then visible to us again, wearing the same shirt and sweater, in a different part of the card-playing room, now standing and accompanied by another man standing, who is the same man with white hair who had been standing inside the bar room in the second scene. Now here, both converse while looking out the window.
The artist’s camera and our own eyes can play subtle tricks when coming upon the images of Ritrovi, such as Pigneto, or other works in the exhibition. Termini, la Stazione (2005) is another example of time and place, the latter Rome’s historic train station, an admixture of styles of the 1930s and 1950s embedded in its design and making. Already, in 2005, when photographed by Bonanzinga it had been renovated within its “dinosaur-like” structure and turned into a modern glass and steel transportation and shopping center in time for the 2000 Jubilee. Now inundated with travelers, restaurant-goers, shoppers, fast food snackers, and people at security stations, it nonetheless retained its sweeping curved facade over the main entrance, its travertine-clad building, with a 10-story hotel above, its historic train shed, and its role and reputation as a crowded, chaotic, but popular destination itself as well as a major portal to Italy and worlds beyond.
The Italian word ritrovi has multiple meanings and interpretations: As a noun it signifies encounters or meetings; as a verb, it is to find again or find yourself. The project began as photographing encounters between multiple individuals, or between individuals and the city, as a means of Bonanzinga searching for and finding herself. The concept evolved into a series of works that embody a combination of portraiture, reportage (or journalism), and landscape, building a new reality that is, as another writer put it, both plausible and surreal. In Bonanzinga’s own words “The way I take photographs is instinctive. I feel the need to capture a moment or I hide behind the camera to become invisible, but I require a medium to mediate reality.”
Patrizia Bonanzinga was born in the northern Italian city of Bolzano and received a degree in Mathematics from the University of Siena. She has lived in Mexico, Algeria, the United States, France, China, and Belgium. While residing in Beijing she began to focus on photography, creating the book, The road to coal (2004), a photographic project that explored the coal industry viewed through its effect on the place, people, and culture it mined. Bonanzinga’s work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art of Rome, the MAXXI National Museum of Arts of XXI century of Rome, the Moscow House of Photography, part of the Multimedia Art Museum of Moscow, the Training and Documentation Centre Ricardo Rangel of Maputo (Mozambique), the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Bracco Foundation in Milan and in numerous private collections.
Ritrovi (Find Yourself): A Photographic Project of Rome was curated by Julius Weyandt.
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For further information, please contact 511 Gallery at (212) 255-2885 or 511gallery@gmail.com
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*Ritrovi (1999-2005)
Patrizia Bonanzinga and Pietro Mari, co-authors,
Photographic project originally exhibited between 1999 and 2007