Virginia Woolf exhibition in Rome dedicated to the writer and where she lived

The Palazzo Altemps in Rome hosts an exhibition titled Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. An exhibition devoted to the great writer and the neighborhood in which he settled with the other orphans of Etienne, his brothers.

It’s hard not to name Virginia Woolf as one of the greatest writers the world has had the good fortune to know. The Palazzo Altemps exhibition in Rome entitled Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury is dedicated to her, her sensitivity, her impeccable “pen” and her full life.

Virginia Woolf (1902)

A great love, a great passion, mixed with talent, for writing and a revolutionary spirit. A free life, but ended by a tragic epilogue: suicide in the heart of the Second World War. A path that crosses the life of Virginia Woolf but also of the district in which she moved with her brothers, Bloomsbury, and from which developed the genius that, even today, we can only celebrate.

An exhibition and a hymn to the “courage” of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury is an exhibition dedicated to one of the greatest writers of all time and to Bloomsbury, the neighborhood where the Stephen orphans moved from the Kensington high-rise. From October 19, 2022 to February 12, 2023, the new exhibition will be hosted at Palazzo Altemps in Rome. Curated by Nadia Fusini and curated by the National Roman Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, London in collaboration with Electa. A story about the famous writer who leaves Bloomsbury, the district where in 1904 Virginia, Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian, Stephen’s orphans, settled at number 46 Gordon Square. A place at the antipodes of the Kensington tower in which they had grown up. Called infamous, but where the young people of Cambridge used to meet every Thursday evening.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf (1912)

They were Thoby’s friends and among them Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Clive Bell and the one who became Virginia’s great love: Leonard Woolf. Surely eccentric and quirky people who wanted to experience the world in a different way from the way their fathers had experienced it. Everything focused on the meaning of the word: whether irony, beauty, truth, all energies came together in a single representative value. As the site Finestre sull’Arte reports: “Bloomsbury was just that: the invention of a new life”.

Virginia Woolf (circa 1925)

And it is precisely the soul that the exhibition intends to bring out, also letting emerge the spirit that represents the very origin of Palazzo Altemps, born as a noble house in the center of the capital. What the exhibition intends to represent, through the works presented, therefore seems to be a hymn to revolution and freedom. Climate in which developed what, without a doubt, we can define as the ‘courage’ of Virginia Woolf who, freedom and moral sincerity, has always asserted herself in her art.