ROME.- A “small” exhibition dedicated to a “great figure,” Lina Bo Bardi, a pioneer of Italian architecture, who became famous after emigrating to Brazil in 1946.

The exhibition Lina Bo Bardi in Italia. "Quello che volevo, era avere Storia" has been organized by MAXXI Architettura on the occasion of the centennial of the architect’s birth on December 5. The exhibition opened to the public from December 19 and is on view until March 15, 2015.

The event, curated by Margherita Guccione, traces the years Lina spent in Italy, her debut, her graduation from university in 1939 in Rome, where she was born, her publishing activity in Milan during the war years, and her voyage by ship, with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi, to their new home, Brazil.

An emblematic photo tells the story of Lina Bo Bardi’s arrival in Brazil: her eyes gaze at the new world – “I felt as though I were in a country beyond one’s imagination, where everything was possible” but in her mind she could still see Italy, the ruins of the war and the intense period of her life in Milan.

After receiving her degree, Lina moved to Milan. Unable to work as an architect during the war years, she got involved in the publication of many architecture periodicals and popular magazines. In addition to her publishing activity, she designed architecture and interior decor for the pages of magazines like Domus and Lo Stile. She also curated illustrations for a feature in Grazia. Un'amica al vostro fianco. Along with Bruno Zevi and Carlo Pagani she founded the magazine A, conceived as a full-fledged illustrated architecture magazine.

During this Italian period, Lina developed her ideas on paper, but the same ideas would be seen in many of her works in Brazil, where she would be offered an even greater chance to manifest her interest in man, the “constant physical protagonist of what we call this adventure that is architecture.” Witness to this are the works exhibited, realized with the collaboration of the magazine Domus and the Lina Bo and P. M. Bardi Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, which include original models, photographs, period magazines, archive documents and videos. But the words of Curriculum letterario, a sort of autobiography which Lina wrote to offer her version of the facts, as well: the detailed account of the years in Italy which introduces us to the exhibition, sheds light on how crucial this period was to the architect’s construction of her future thinking.

“Lina is one of the most fascinating figures of twentieth-century architecture owing to her personality and her professional commitment to the whole field – says Margherita Guccione –, from publishing to design, from museography to cinema, from teaching activities to works of outstanding expressive force realized in Brazil, in São Paulo and Bahia. The Museum of Architecture retraces the life of this talented woman – in a man’s world – first in Rome, then in Milan, of essential importance to her work, and to our understanding of her life as an intellectual and the topicality of her ideas.”