ESSERE MARE, tra gli ossi di seppia

2nd July – 18th August 2026

On Thursday, 2 July, Galleria Susanna Orlando in Pietrasanta is pleased to present ESSERE MARE, tra gli ossi di seppia (BEING SEA, Among Cuttlefish Bones) curated by Beatrice Audrito and Susanna Orlando. The exhibition reflects on the landscape and atmosphere of Versilia as a place that generates artistic languages, but also as an emotional and cultural matrix that has shaped Susanna Orlando’s own curatorial and collecting vision throughout her fifty years of activity.

For decades, between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Apuan Alps, painters, sculptors, poets and writers have passed through and inhabited Versilia not merely as a holiday destination, but as a place of reflection, a laboratory of relationships, ideas and images. BEING SEA, Among Cuttlefish Bones stems from the desire to revisit the profound connection between Versilia and the artistic and poetic sensibility that, throughout the twentieth century, found between Forte dei Marmi, the coastline and the Apuan hinterland a privileged setting for contemplation, reflection and creative inquiry.

More than a geographical region, Versilia has represented for many artists, writers and poets an interior landscape: a territory suspended between the sea and the Apuan Alps, where the rarefied light of the pinewoods, the silence of the shoreline and the melancholy of the horizon gradually shaped perception, colour, material and pictorial language. This atmosphere led many painters—who sought in Versilia silence rather than social life—towards an intimate, existential approach, characterised by subdued tones, suspended atmospheres and a contemplative tension capable of transforming landscape into an inner experience.

The exhibition brings together a selection of artists who established a profound connection with Versilia, walking along its wide beaches, breathing the scent of the sea and absorbing its atmosphere and emotional resonance until these became an integral part of their artistic language. Masters of twentieth-century Italian art—including Alberto Savinio, Carlo Carrà, Ardengo Soffici, Massimo Campigli, Ottone Rosai, Mino Maccari, Arturo Dazzi, Renato Guttuso and Lorenzo Viani—are presented alongside more contemporary figures such as Ruggero Savinio, Carlo Mattioli, Aldo Mondino, Piero Gilardi, Giuseppe Biagi and Guido Borgianni, reflecting the refined and distinctive vision of Susanna Orlando.

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Galleria Susanna Orlando, the exhibition also becomes a reflection on the gallerist’s own eye and on the choices that have defined her professional journey. Raised between Forte dei Marmi and Pietrasanta, immersed in the suspended light and contemplative atmosphere of Versilia, Susanna Orlando has developed over the years a coherent and highly personal vision, favouring artists whose restrained palettes and poetic sensibility transform landscape into an intimate experience. BEING SEA, Among Cuttlefish Bones therefore becomes a cultural self-portrait of the gallery through the artists who, through shared affinities, have shaped its exhibition history and identity, revealing the vision of a gallerist who has interpreted this distinctive Versilian sensibility with remarkable insight. Hers is a gaze formed within this landscape, one that continues to resonate across generations.

The exhibition title deliberately recalls Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) by Eugenio Montale, a poet deeply connected with Versilia and with Susanna Orlando’s own life, having met him in Forte dei Marmi while accompanying her father, Angelo Orlando. Here, the “cuttlefish bones” become a metaphor for a journey made of traces and memories left upon the shore: like fragments returned by the sea, the works and artistic sensibilities gathered in the exhibition emerge from a path travelled slowly, through silence and contemplation.

The installation unfolds as a single environment of relationships, where artworks, books, poetic fragments and musical traces come together within one unified vision. Rather than a historical survey, the exhibition presents itself as an emotional geography of Versilia: a narrative of places, atmospheres, affinities and inner correspondences that continue, quietly yet powerfully, to inform contemporary artistic research.

Opening Reception

Thursday, 2 July 2026, 7:00 pm

For the opening evening, the exhibition will expand into a further artistic dimension through live musical performances by soprano Alida Berti and clarinettist Ioan Bodnarciuc, who will alternate throughout the evening. Together they will create an original musical score of voices, breath and sound, accompanying visitors through an intimate sensory experience. More than a musical accompaniment, the performance becomes an artwork in its own right—an encounter between visual art and music in which sound takes on material presence, deepening the audience’s experience and offering a new perspective on the exhibition itself.