The exhibition focuses on the earliest days of photography taking as its starting point around 150 photographs from the Marco Antonetto Collection (around 1850) . The so-called veduta painting, a detailed painting of print of a city landscape, was the examples for the earliest photographers. The exhibition illustrates the different manners in which Rome was viewed prompted by scientific research, artistic passion or professional and commercial demands. The selection displays the specificity of the earliest aspects of photography in Rome, from the first experiments with the Albumin technique, daguerreotypes, Helium- and Collodium and paper negatives, to the birth of professional photographic studios and the creation of the most popular and successful sets of images on the international market. The archaeological and historical value of these early photography is immense and the architecture and urban landscape of the ancient Roman city and the later Papal state can be viewed without the megalomaniac building activities of Mussolini after 1922.
