In the golden light of Puglia, where the sea meets ancient stone, the Palazzo delle Arti Beltrani in Trani transforms into a temple of auteur photography. From April 16 to June 30, 2025, the exhibition Stories of Puglia: Photographs from the Gianni Berengo Gardin Archive, curated by Alessia Venditti and organized by Delle Arti Odv Ets, celebrates for the first time in Puglian soil the work of the master who immortalized Italy with a poetic and rigorous eye. Thirty-five black-and-white shots, selected from two million images in his archive, narrate a region suspended between tradition and transformation, between age-old silences and the stirrings of progress.
Gianni Berengo Gardin, born in 1930, a bibliophile and narrator of reality, turned social and landscape reportage into a timeless art, collaborating with giants like Olivetti, Renzo Piano, and the Touring Club Italiano, for which he captured in the 1960s the essence of a Puglia in ferment, already destined to become a destination for international tourism. “The color distracts from the subject,” the photographer often repeated, and indeed it is in the contrast between light and shadow that Puglia’s soul emerges from the whitewashed villages to the neorealist architectures of Trani, captured with a grace that borders on the painterly. The exhibition, enriched with unpublished images and historical prints published in the Attraverso l’Italia series, becomes a journey through time, where the Puglian cities of the 1960s—with their “refined vitalisms” described in the pages of Le vie d’Italia—dialogue with the present. A special section is dedicated to Trani, portrayed by Berengo Gardin on multiple occasions, cloaked in an almost metaphysical charm, between Romanesque portals and marine horizons.
Curated by Alessia Venditti with contributions from Marcello Sparaventi and architect Mariana Soricelli, the exhibition is not only a tribute to the region but also a reflection on its metamorphosis. As Giuseppe Bozzini wrote in 1967, Puglia was already then, a “garden of enchantments” waiting to be discovered, with tourism poised to explode. Today, those same images—preserved at the MoMA in New York or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France—become emotional maps for cultured travelers seeking not only scenic beauty but stories embodied in stone and light. For the luxury visitor, the exhibition is an invitation to explore Puglia with fresh eyes: after admiring Berengo Gardin’s shots, one can wander through the narrow streets of Trani, dine in masserie converted into art residences, or sail along the Adriatic coast, where every cove seems straight out of one of his photographs. An itinerary that blends culture, elegance, and authenticity, just like the works of the master, where luxury lies in the depth of the gaze, not in ostentation. Because, as his shots teach us, true beauty needs no colors: it lives in contrast, in memory, and in the light that sculpts time.
