Return. Lest we forget

On May 27, 1993, at 1:04 a.m., a car bomb exploded in Florence, in the heart of the city, on Via dei Georgofili, right next to the Uffizi. It was a Mafia bombing organized within that criminal strategy that shook Italy in 1992-1993. Five people died: Fabrizio Nencioni, Angela Fiume, with their daughters, Nadia, 9, and Caterina, a few days old, and Dario Capolicchio. Damage to the museum was also extensive, some paintings were shattered, and structures were seriously damaged. In the following days a wave of extraordinary solidarity rose against this heinous attack on one of the emblems of universal culture.

It was at that occasion that the collector Giuliano Gori, accepting the wish of the then museum director Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, and assisted by a specially constituted committee of experts, decided to launch a campaign of donations involving internationally renowned artists in order to "compensate" the artistic heritage so badly affected. Thanks to the many heartfelt responses to that appeal, within two years the museum was enriched with many works of extraordinary quality and heterogeneity. In February 1995, the Uffizi presented the new collection in a special exhibition. Sixty-two works were selected to be part of it, one for each artist: an important catalog accompanied the exhibition, published thanks to the generosity of the Olschki publishing house and edited, like the exhibition itself, by Stefania Gori.

Today, thirty years after the attack, the Uffizi symbolically brings back the same exhibition, composed of 62 graphic works donated by dozens of international artists, as a tribute to that generousity, as well as a renewed warning not to forget such a dramatic page in the history of the Uffizi and of Italy as a whole.

The artists

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Karel Appel, Arman, Eduardo Arroyo, Kengiro Azuma, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Enrico Castellani, César, Christo e Jeanne-Claude Christo, Stephen Cox, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Dorazio, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sam Francis, Michel Gérard, Leon Golub, Jenny Holzer, Bukichi Inoue, Emilio Isgrò, Ben Jakober e Yannick Vu, Magdalena Jetelová, Donald Judd, Menashe Kadishman, Dani Karavan, Alex Katz, Piotr Kowalski, Robert Kushner, Paola Levi Montalcini, Sol LeWitt, Luigi Mainolfi, Robert Mangold, Henry Moore, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, David Nash, Nunzio, Dennis Oppenheim, Mimmo Paladino, Marta Pan, Giulio Paolini, A. R. Penck, Beverly Pepper, Vettor Pisani, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Anne e Patrick Poirier, Robert Rauschenberg, Susana Solano, Alan Sonfist, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Nancy Spero, Daniel Spoerri, Mauro Staccioli, George Trakas, Costas Tsoclis, Franco Vaccari, Giuliano Vangi, Emilio Vedova, Aleš Veselý, Lawrence Weiner, Gilberto Zorio.