La quindicenne prodigio dello sci Andrea Mead Lawrence si allena per i Giochi olimpici invernali. Pico Peak, Vermont, Stati Uniti. Immagine di George Silk. © 1947. The Picture Collection LLC. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Winter Games!
The sport that made history

A photographic journey through the Scavi Scaligeri in Verona

Winter Games! presents a selection of photographs dedicated to winter sports, capable of conveying much more than just competition. The images, taken between the 1930s and the early 1970s, portray sport as a lived experience and shared spectacle, as a space for relationships between bodies, audiences, and landscape, during a crucial phase in the construction of the contemporary visual imagination. The photographs on display come from the LIFE archive, one of the great photographic legacies of the twentieth century, capable of capturing gestures, rituals, and moments destined to become embedded in the collective memory. Waits, leaps, falls and moments emerge like fragments of life observed up close, establishing a dialogue between athletic gestures and the time that surrounds them. In the underground spaces of the reopened Centro Internazionale di Fotografia – Scavi Scaligeri, in the subterranean heart of Verona, these images encounter a place rich in stratifications, amplifying the perception of time and transforming the visit into an immersive experience, in which the past dialogues with the present. The exhibition is promoted by the Municipality of Verona, conceived by Giuseppe Ceroni, curated by Simone Azzoni and produced by Silvana Editoriale in collaboration with PEP Artists and Grenze – Arsenali Fotografici.

SPORT IN THE COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION

The photographs on display present winter sports as a cultural phenomenon, even more than a competitive discipline. Skiing, skating, bobsleigh and cross-country skiing become the starting point for observing a society in transformation, where athleticism intertwines with spectators, landscapes, architecture, and collective rituals. The images convey the atmosphere of the historic Olympics, but also moments of anticipation, falls, smiles, and bodies in motion captured outside the rhetoric of victory. In this visual narrative, sport emerges as a shared language, capable of constructing an imagery that spans generations and geographical boundaries. The exhibition thus offers a broad, multi-layered interpretation, in which photography becomes a tool for understanding the twentieth century through its passions, spectacles and myths.

AN ARCHIVE THAT PORTRAYS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The heart of Winter Games! lies in the extraordinary quality and variety of the selected images, drawn from LIFE’s photographic archive, which has chronicled the twentieth century in all its forms. Taken by some of the last century’s most important photographers, the photographs on display document nearly forty years of history, from the 1936 Garmisch-Partenkirchen Olympics to the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, passing through Cortina 1956. Each image is conceived not only as a document, but as a visual experience: a fragment capable of capturing the spirit of an era, the evolution of customs, the relationship between the individual and the masses. The exhibition invites visitors to recognize how these images contributed to building a shared visual memory, still profoundly recognizable today.

The exhibition Winter Games! finds its special setting within the Scavi Scaligeri, finally returned to the city of Verona after a decade of closure and following an extensive redevelopment project carried out under the direction of the Edilizia Monumentale del Comune di Verona and of Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio di Verona, Rovigo e Vicenza. This unique site once again becomes Verona’s hub for art photography. Here, the architecture designed by Libero Cecchini enhances the state-owned archaeological area uncovered by Peter Hudson, a pioneer of urban archaeology. The reopening of the Scavi Scaligeri is the result of an investment exceeding €2.6 million and two years of complex restoration works, which improved accessibility along entrance and exit routes and addressed the main structural and technical issues. The Scavi Scaligeri preserve an archaeological and historical stratification of extraordinary significance, now brought into dialogue with the exhibition potential offered to art photography, reconnecting with the prestigious activities carried out by the International Center of Photography between 1996 and 2015. Using historic monuments as spaces for cultural engagement—through careful and informed stewardship—restores their vitality, transforming them from places of memory into places of experience. In this dialogue between archaeology and contemporaneity, Verona demonstrates how new meanings and new forms of cultural participation can be generated. — Damiano Tommasi, Mayor of Verona