Spreading visual culture: contemporary art through periodicals, archives and illustrations.

«Lo Spirito Folletto», which significantly recalls the previous one published in 1848 in Milan by Redaelli, allows the Project to cover a broad time span (1861-1885), full of events for the Italian history, symbolizing at best also the industrialization of the satirical press. With «Lo Spirito Folletto», the humoristic periodical becomes indeed an expensive item, with really painstaking images, which are often genre-paintings (“lithographs”), sold in special collections. Arriving thus at the end of the nineteenth century, a general consideration of the relationship between “high” and “low” visual culture cannot be separated from the study of the Liberty art, one of the last “global” and “multidirectional” movements, capable to characterize all the aspects of the modern society, from the interiors to the style of many illustrators and artists. In this sense, it is absolutely necessary a careful rereading of fundamental periodicals such as «L'Eroica» (founded in 1911 in La Spezia by Ettore Cozzani), «Ebe» (founded in Chiavari in 1905 and directed by Louis Romulo Sanguineti, alias Luigi Amaro ), «Riviera Ligure»: privileged places not only for the high quality of the literary debate hosted on their pages (from Giovanni Pascoli, Luigi Pirandello, Umberto Saba, followed by Dino Campana, Clemente Rebora, Giovanni Boine, Camillo Sbarbaro, up to Piero Jahier, Giuseppe Ungaretti and many others) but also for the high artistic profile (among others, Franz Laskoff, Kienerk George, Edward De Albertis, Plinio Nomellini, Adolfo Magrini). In particular, «Riviera Ligure», which, emblematically, was founded in 1895 as the commercial bulletin of the Sasso Olive Oil Company of Oneglia (now Imperia), soon became, thanks to Mario Novaro (its owner and director but most of all intellectual, poet, philosopher and industrial entrepreneur), an incredibly advanced and privileged meeting point of both the Italian poetry of the first 20th century and the updated Liberty graphics, without losing its “business” and promotional vocation. A fundamental aspect, concerning the relationship between text and image, is the fact that Mario Novaro came quickly to release the picture from the text, without necessarily asking the artist to become an illustrator of other people's ideas, recognizing the same dignity to the graphic and literary work (even in terms of payments). The strength of the analysis in this case is the possibility to collaborate with Mario Novaro Foundation and Archive, where are preserved valuable epistolary materials, thus allowing the researchers to reconstruct in its entirety the complex history of the magazine.