Uno, Cinque Dodici. Ottant’anni del Premio Strega
a cura di Maria Luisa Frisa e Mario Lupano
29.04.2026 - 30.08.2026
MACRO, Via Nizza. Roma
The exhibition Uno, Cinque, Dodici. Ottant’anni del Premio Strega brings into view the different layers of interpretation that the long history of the literary prize offers to visitors, presenting an “ideal library” made up of the more than one thousand volumes selected from 1947 to the present day. Organised in chronological sequence, it recounts, in parallel, the events, protagonists, controversies and media narratives that have accompanied the seventy-nine editions held so far.
The exhibition design is conceived around a single object, placed at the centre of the room. This pavilion is imagined as a room within a room: an autonomous architecture and, at the same time, an exhibition device capable of staging the different environments that have accompanied the history of the Prize. The interiors evoke an intimate and domestic dimension, made up of rooms, textile surfaces and colours that recall the settings associated with the birth of the Prize and the community that animated it. The exterior, by contrast, appears as an abstract and essential shell, designed to display the books in a contemporary art museum.
This essentiality is nevertheless animated by a series of elements that articulate the surfaces of the pavilion: the windows opening inwards, the shortlisted books and the sequence of winners. These elements give rhythm to the architecture through an almost classical articulation, despite its essential materiality. The covers of the winning books, with their different formats and designs, emerge from the aluminium planes, introducing a visual vibration into the ordered whole. The balance between abstraction, rarefied materiality and archival objects helps to convey the various dimensions of the Premio Strega: its spaces as at once private, public and institutional.
Finally, the visitor’s experience of the exhibition is based on the interaction between display and public. Visitors approach the pavilion and, through the gesture of opening the windows inwards, activate the device, which responds to their action by assuming ever-changing configurations.
