In 1946, Corrado Cagli created an exemplary drawing, Tempo d’amore and gifted it to his good friend, Igor Stravinsky. The work was then given by Stravinsky to the American Academy in Rome, a testament to the friendship that he and Cagli shared with then-director Laurance Roberts, who led the Academy from 1946 to 1960.
Now, for the first time since 1946, the drawing is on public view in Corrado Cagli: Nostoi. Rome New York Taormina, an exhibition at Palazzo Corvaja in Taormina, Sicily, that follows the creative journey and complex homecoming of Corrado Cagli (1910–1976). The show closes on October 18.
The exhibition is curated by Raffaele Bedarida, with the artistic direction of Franco Baldasso (2019 Italian Fellow), and features exhibition design by Pietro Airoldi (2025 Affiliated Artist). It traces the artist’s personal and creative journey across three cities and two countries that were crucial in shaping his identity.
It moves from Fascist and postwar Rome to his exile and rebirth in New York, and finally to his Italian return to Taormina in the 1960s, where he found an international crossroads for artists and intellectuals where he made his home.
Cagli's Italian homecoming
Expanding on an exhibition held at the Center for Italian Modern Art in 2023, also curated by Raffaele Bedarida, Nostoi focuses on Cagli’s return to Italy, framed as a complicated yet profound homecoming.
For Bedarida, Cagli is increasingly relevant because of the way he navigated his Jewish and queer identity amid Fascist persecution, his exile and subsequent nomadic lifestyle, and the way his activism fostered a community-based art practice across three adopted cities: Rome, New York, and Taormina.
“Like in New York, Cagli’s show in Taormina resonates with local and international visitors alike, as it interrogates both situated memories and global issues through an incessant urge to imagine new logics,” said Bedarida.
The exhibition features Cagli’s relationships with a network of international collaborators, including Igor Stravinsky, Danilo Dolci, Charles Olson, and George Balanchine, alongside friends from the community of exiled intellectuals, with whom he stayed in touch between Rome and Taormina: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Victor Brauner, Eugene Berman (1959 Resident), and Saul Steinberg.
The show also features Tumulto (1946), inscribed “To Isabella and Laurance Roberts with great friendship and gratitude, as ever Corrado Cagli - Rome 1947.”
Taormina, and in particular the historic Casa Cuseni, served as a meeting place for artists, activists, and advocates for civil liberties. The work is dedicated to the magistrate Giuseppe Navarra and was inspired by the struggles of the judiciary against the Mafia after the 1969 Viale Lazio massacre, a cause Cagli shared with Dolci and others. Taormina gave Cagli, who bought a studio there in 1962, the space to rethink his own history and artistic language, and to experiment.
The Academy's Tempo D'amore (1946)
“This exhibition was born out of many conversations, in the true spirit of Corrado Cagli, who throughout his career passionately engaged in collaborative works with artists, poets, and musicians, crossing disciplines and boundaries,” said artistic director Franco Baldasso.
The Academy lent Cagli’s drawing Tempo d’amore (1946) for the exhibition, and its inclusion was especially serendipitous: while Baldasso was at the Academy for the Society of Fellows Reunion, he learned that the work was part of the Academy’s collection.
“This synergy not only continues Cagli’s best collaborative practices, it also builds upon AAR’s spirit of intellectual and artistic exchange,” said Baldasso.
Airoldi, an architect with a studio in Palermo, oversaw the exhibition design at Palazzo Corvaja. His design sets the artworks against the medieval architecture, moving between monumentality and solemnity, with moments for intervals of intimacy and contemplation.