A Metaphysical Olympic Games opens in Milan – Milan – Arte.it

Milan – On certain winter afternoons, when the sun quickly disappears behind the buildings of Milan and the city remains silent, it is as if you are entering a metaphysical painting without even realizing it. The shadows lengthen like theater sets, passersby become floating figures, and even the traffic seems to thin out to a distant murmur. It is in that almost surreal period that we understand why Milan wants to tell his story through metaphysics at this moment. It is not a tribute to the past. But a “tone statement”. A language of waiting, of measuring, of thinking slowly. A counterpoint to the madness that accompanies every Olympic evening.Metaphysics / Metaphysicsthe great initiative put together by Vincenzo Trione which opens at the end of January 2026, seems to want to transform this latent tendency of the city into a widespread exhibition trail. Not a unique exhibition, but a novel in four chapters: Royal Palace, Museum of the twentieth century, Galleries of Italy e Citterio Palace. A route “of two thousand steps” through the heart of the small megalopolis, which already seems to be a symbolic statement: it is not enough to enter a museum, you have to cross the city to understand its spirit.

The first chapter – the largest and probably most celebrated – will take place in the theaters of Royal Palace. Here, from January 28 to June 21, 2026, more than three hundred works will be brought together covering the history of metaphysics, from its origins in Ferrara in 1916 to its dissemination in the twentieth century and into the present. They are the names everyone expects, but their presence seems reconsidered in light of the context: De Chirico, Savinio, Carra, Morandi e from Pisis they are not presented as untouchable icons, but still appear to be active resources. Around them a constellation of artists who over the years have collected, betrayed and reinvented the metaphysical lesson: Magritte, Ernst, Dalí, WarholThan Mimmo Paladino, Giulio Paolini, Jannis Kounellis, Francesco Vezzoli. Not just any list, but a system of resonances suggesting how metaphysics has continued to live in film, design, fashion, architecture, even theater and photography.

Il Museum of the twentieth centurywhere the archives are housed Ettore and Claudia Gian Ferrariis instead destined to tackle a more surprising theme: the interrelationship between Metafisica and Milan itself. An almost marginal story that often fades into the background, but has deep roots. De Chirico, Savinio and Carrà collaborated with the Theater La Scala in the forties and fifties; they designed sets, sketches, costumes; they entered the dense cultural fabric of the city in an era when Milan was not yet the ‘economic capital’, but was slowly becoming the capital of ideas. The aim of the exhibition at the Museo del Novecento seems to want to explore that dialogue, through archival material, model and photos, to find a city he used artists not as an ornamentbut how protagonistsable to invent and reimagine places, spaces and experiences.

All Galleries of Italy – flagship of the banking group Intesa San Paolo which is located in the Milan salon of Piazza della Scala – the story seems to become even more specific: here a lost place will come into focus Giorgio Morandi’s studio. The look that this lost place evokes is that of a great photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin and promises to become the intimate heart of the entire Metafisica / Metafisiche project. Few rooms, an almost monastic space, which arises in contrast to the Olympic scale that the city will assume in 2026 and which will present a radically opposite image: the power of a thought that grows not in celebration, but in concentration.

In the end Citterio Palacea new exhibition space that belongs to the so-called Great Brerawill welcome from February 6 until the beginning of April a free gift of William Kentridge to Giorgio Morandi. A video installation divided into two moments, which aims to restore what seemed immobile in Metaphysics for decades: the time. Kentridge – an artist for whom memory, rhythm and layering are living matter, as we have clearly seen in his exhibitions and performances in Spoleto last summer – is the ideal choice to translate into movement what Morandi had entrusted to him Silence.

If you read the few pages of information currently available on the entire project, Metafisica / Metafisiche, despite its cyclopean promise, does not seem to want to amaze with special effects. On the contrary: keep going a more subtle discussion: in the year in which the whole world will look at Italy, Milan chooses to show itself through a language that does not run, does not shout, does not make spectacular. A language that does not pretend to please everyone, but that invites us to a different rhythm. In an Olympic context dominated by speed, by measuring gestures, by overcoming limits, the city proposes a cultural counterimage: slowness as a form of clarity.

And then it will come Roma. From July 2026 (the dates have yet to be confirmed – ed), where the exhibition should move to National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Artfor a second life that evokes the promise of dialogue. Unlike Milan, Rome will not have to build everything from scratch: many metaphysical works are in their depot, and the arrival of the project will provide the opportunity to put historical material back into circulation, compare loans, renew routes and even reposition some chapters of the permanent collection. It will be a new exhibition, not a simple ‘relocation’ or ‘localization’ of the great Milanese project. A rewriting that could make metaphysics not only a tribute to a movement, but also an investigation into its mutations over time and places.

If all this comes to fruition as proposed, Metafisica/Metafisiche could become more than an Olympic exhibition event. And not just a theme of “art and advertisingIt could offer the country a rare opportunity to tell its identity, not through the noise, but through what remains quiet and persistent. Milan will do this by transforming the city into a sequence of metaphysical perspectives; Rome could do this by reopening its immense archives. Together, Milan and Rome could restore the idea of ​​an Italy that does not limit itself to preserving the images of its ‘glorious’ past, but continues to generate, move and make them come alive in the present.