Image: Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Naples
Intesa Sanpaolo and iO Donna are presenting ‘LIBERE! 1946–2026. Le conquiste delle donne’ at Gallerie d’Italia-Milano, in an exhibition conceived and curated by Renata Ferri. The exhibition is open from 26 September 2026 through 7 February 2027 and is accompanied by public initiatives including school tours and cultural meetings.
Promoted by iO Donna in collaboration with Gallerie d’Italia-Milano for the 30th anniversary of the RCS MediaGroup magazine, the project traces 80 years of Italy’s republican history through photography from women’s point of view. Its account of that history is built around the relationship between photographic images and the changes in women’s lives and rights in Italy.
The exhibition brings together approximately 50 photographs from the Publifoto Intesa Sanpaolo archive, the Contrasto agency archive and Paola Agosti’s archive. Documents and testimonies are shown alongside the photographs in a route that returns to the country’s collective memory.
The narrative begins on 2 June 1946, when Italian women participated for the first time in a national political consultation, and follows the principal stages in the evolution of women’s rights and Italian society. Its subjects include universal suffrage and the contribution of the Constituent Mothers, reform of family law and the introduction of divorce, equality at work and access to professions, the mobilisations of the feminist movement, and recognition of sexual violence as a crime against the person. Alongside prominent women in politics, culture, science, business and the professions, the exhibition pays tribute to ordinary women as workers, students, mothers, activists, voters, athletes and citizens who helped change Italy’s face.
Among the identified works is a 1970 photograph by Gianni Berengo Gardin in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo. Another image records Simonetta Appolloni and Laura Lo Pieno, women stationmasters between the tracks at Milan’s Porta Garibaldi station, in 1967. Gallerie d’Italia-Milano is part of Intesa Sanpaolo’s Gallerie d’Italia museum project, together with the venues in Turin, Naples and Vicenza.
