In the modern era, the archive – whether endorsed or personal – seems to have become the most significant means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored and, most importantly, retrieved. Traces and testimonies of any sort, attributed even to events such as the World War II or the fall of communism for example, have provoked a reconsideration of the authority of historical truth (in its narrower sense).

Perhaps the impact of the beautiful photographs in the manual by Giovanni Becatti on the art of the Classical
age was decisive. For a fifteen-year-old high school student, in an age far removed from TV formats and cheap
travel, the impact of the “Galata morente” [The Dying Gaul] and the attic pediments brought together two
existential tensions: the journey and the past. Thus, through those photographs, art rushed upon teenagers, urging
them to reveal their inner world, the secret compulsions towards a monumental Classicism.

“The dream”, Gaston Bachelard writes, “issues from the animus, and rêverie from the anima. Rêverie with drama, without event or history gives us true repose, the repose of feminine”1. Where the dream is “marked by the hard accents of the masculine”, rêverie is “of feminine essence”. Let us go further: the dream is hard because it engages the real, which is hard, with the hope of transforming it into something soft and flexible, so that it can be re-made into the personal.