Emanuele Luzzati

Emanuele Luzzati’s Presepe (Christman crib) was set up in the Giardini Sambuy in 1997 and, due to its great success, the following year the city decided to launch the Luci d’Artista project. The silhouettes of the Nativity figures were mounted on a structure that could be taken-down, consisting of walkways, platforms and steps similar to those Luzzati used in the theatre. In front of the Giardini, hundreds of lights lit up the contours and decorations of the façade of the Porta Nuova railway station, while at the beginning of via Roma, a comet was the starting point of the luminous festoons that unrolled suspended in the street like a long tail. In later editions, this part of the work was called Strada dei Magi (Three Wise Men Street). 

Emanuele Luzzati (Genoa, 1921-2007) was a set designer, painter and ceramist. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts et Arts Appliqués in Lausanne where he had taken refuge in 1940 to escape the racial laws. He has worked with some of the most important prose companies and theatres such as La Scala in Milan and La Fenice in Venice and, in 1976, he founded the Teatro della Tosse in Genoa with Tonino Conte and Aldo Trionfo. He illustrated children’s books and classics such as Pinocchio or Il Milione. Always driven by the desire to reinvent the relationship between spectators and actors with mobile and removable stage settings, suitable for a theatre where fairy tales, chronicles and poetry intertwine, Luzzati received the Ubu Prize in 1995 and the title of Grand Officer for the Order of Merit in 2001. 

Silvia Maria Sara Cammarata