Letters to Bernini

It is August 3, 1667. In his Roman studio, an elderly Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the highest artistic authority of Baroque Rome, angrily evokes the figure of Francesco Borromini, the great Ticino architect with whom he shared rivalries and conflicts.

When news of his death arrives, something changes: anger is replaced by pity and the rival becomes, for a moment, an artist to be recognized.

From this missed meeting, Marco Martinelli builds a discussion on competition, ambition, and the relationship between artists. Bernini and Borromini's seventeenth century thus becomes a space for looking also at the present, its contradictions and the difficulty of recognizing the value of those we consider an adversary.

Letters to Bernini brings to the stage a central figure of Baroque Roma to tell, through his relationship with the enemy, the need to assert himself and the possibility of changing his gaze.

By Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari, with Marco Cacciola and Alessandro Monte and Benedetta Nina Tosolini.