One of Danilo Donati's preparatory sketches for Federico Fellini's Casanova I Photo: Courtesy Archivio Fotografico Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli

Danilo Donati's sets for Federico Fellini's Casanova exhibited in the rooms of the historic Olivetti Shop in Piazza San Marco - owned by Assicurazioni Generali, entrusted to the care and management of the FAI since 2011 - evoke an emblematic image of memory and psychology of the famous Venetian adventurer, whose Venice emerges from the imagination as the origin where everything begins, describing how Casanova's is a journey towards the borders of Europe, but at the same time it is also a journey backwards towards a longed-for Venice and imagined, reconstructed by Fellini in extremely symbolic forms. The preparatory cartoons of the sets by Donati, award-winning set designer and costume designer of Italian cinema, exhibited for the first time at the Olivetti Shop, lead the visitor inside the Venice of the film, full of suggestions and dreamlike fantasies, through sketches that belong to a wider collection (that of the Cirulli Foundation) and translate into the metaphor of an existential journey along the succession of episodes narrated by Fellini in the tormented rereading of the biography of the famous Venetian.

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