L'Arca dei Folli

The Madness free from sad thoughts

The art group "L' Arca dei Folli" was born from an initiative of Danilo Tomassetti and Annunzia Fumagalli, at the end of 1991. His first seat the art room Ciak 2° of the painter Rocco Spinelli. The initial group also includes Nazzareno Tomassetti and painter Antonella Spinelli. The name is inspired by a book "The praise of folly" by Erasmus of Rotterdam, and a painting "The Ship of fools" by Bosch. The artists of "L' Arca dei Folli" love to give a cultural content to their exhibitions, trying to seduce the interest of those who are far from the arts. "I folli" organize demonstrations in the most heterogeneous places possible from the country bowling alley, to the cloister or church of the fourteenth century, or to the noble palace, transforming them into a temple of arts, using materials as poetic verses to recreate lost atmospheres. With the meeting with "la Cantina dell'Arte di Ripatransone", in the demonstrations of the crazy music enters, initially with concerts for harpsichord and violin, then comes on stage the international opera. In 2001 "L' Arca dei Folli" becomes a cultural association, somehow ends the movement and institutionalizes. The initial group of artists is always in core of the association, but the various cultural interweavings with La cantina dell'Arte di Ripatransone and the meeting with prof. Gian Paolo Micio Proietti, one of the most important men of international opera, convince the artists of movement, that their message will not lose purity, if the group becomes association.