#1 [ENG] Introduction

“Welcome, I’m Nadia Righi, director of the Carlo Maria Martini Diocesan Museum, where we are today. In recent years the museum has given greater attention to the language of photography and, continuing in this vein, we commemorate the centenary of the birth of Mario De Biasi with this exhibition. Through his great talent, his extraordinary technical competence, his insatiable curiosity as man and artist, De Biasi saw Milan with a profoundly new and interesting eye, capturing the most poetic aspects of everyday life.It therefore seems only right that his adoptive city pays homage to him in the halls of this museum, which has always been connected to Milan and its inhabitants.So attentive to the great facts of history as he found himself travelling the world, De Biasi instead shows a more intimate and authentically human dimension here. In a fast-paced city like ours, he asks us to slow down, suggesting his way of seeing things and inviting us to discover his own desire to know within ourselves.I hope you have a pleasant visit.To explore the world through the eyes of photographer Mario De Biasi is to be immersed in a galaxy of images — images shot in a lifetime of 90 years, almost 70 of which were devoted to photography. Through the lens of his camera — he always had three or four around his neck wherever he went — De Biasi set himself the difficult challenge of capturing everything around him, and organizing it according to his personal mental categories. Mondadori Portfolio, the photography division of the Mondadori Group — the publisher to whom De Biasi dedicated his career — has collected, enhanced and digitized a fundamental core of his vast archive, a faithful mirror of the world.Together with the photographer’s daughter Silvia De Biasi, the exhibition co-curator Maria Vittoria Baravelli will guide our first steps through the work of this giant of 20th century photography.“It’s true that Mario De Biasi was an absolute "globetrotter," as his wife called him. But after every trip he returned home to Milan which was always his real base camp! This exhibition is dedicated to the photographer’s vision of the city. His Milan is explored slowly, revealing something more about the eye of the observer in every detail, while simultaneously telling us more about who we were, and also, perhaps, about who we could and shall be. One might say that De Biasi really focused on desire, that is, the will to be there and to understand the places and times in which he lived.Do you know who De Biasi really was? A man who never considered himself a great photographer. On the contrary, he was always amazed by the attention that his work aroused in people. A man who perpetually nourished the innate curiosity towards the ’other,’ from which he always sought to learn and then share, giving all of himself and committing himself to the limit". “Mario De Biasi and Milan. Special edition” is a Mondadori Portfolio project.We would like to thank Greenberg Traurig Santa Maria Studio Legale Associato, Modulnova, San Carlo, Graphicscalve e Litosud for their contributions which made this exhibition possible.