1927 The Return to Italy. Salvatore Ferragamo and the Twentiethcentury Visual Culture

Salvatore Ferragamo returned to Italy in 1927 after twelve years in the United States. In 2017, to mark the 90th anniversary of his homecoming, the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo presents an exhibition with an overview of the 1920s, a decade now recognized as an authentic forge of open-minded ideas and experimentation free of ideological constraints and prejudices.
Ferragamo chose to settle in Florence in virtue of its centrality in Italian taste and style at a time in which the word "return" was especially meaningful: the return to order in the arts, the return to professional skill and the great national tradition. Developed in chapters like a coming-of-age story, the exhibition focuses precisely on this trend in the culture of the period. The volume takes Ferragamo's voyage on an ocean liner back to Italy as its leitmotif: a metaphor of his mental journey through the Italian visual culture of the 1920s, the source of themes and works that influenced his poetic vision, directly or indirectly. At the same time, it also encompasses all the cultural and social facets that distinguished Italy's rebirth after the Great War, on the eve of the authoritarian regime imposed by Fascism.