Lucio Dalla & Roberto Roversi. Automobili. A record

The National Automobile Museum by Turin presents an extraordinary exhibition project dedicated to a masterpiece of Italian discography: the concept album Automobiles, published in 1976 from RCA. Fifty years after its release, the exhibition curated by Carlo Emilio Zummo e Mario Esposito transforms the Project Room museum into a living archive, where the collaboration between the singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla and the poet Roberto Roversi is re-read as a critical lens for understanding the transformations of the Twentieth century.

The exhibition route winds its way through archive materials originals from the collection of Antonio Bagnoliincluding handwritten notebooks, handwritten letters, posters of the theatre show “The future of the automobile” and unpublished documents related to the pseudonym “.“Norisso“. The exhibition brings the epic and popular dimensions of the car into dialogue through two iconic cars: the Alfa Romeo type B P3 of 1932, symbol of the myth of speed and the feats of Nuvolari, and the Autobianchi Bianchina of 1967, emblem of mass motorisation and the economic boom. The songs on the disc become narrative matrices that trigger a profound reflection on the relationship between man, technology e environment, investigating the car not only as a technical object, but as an ideological device capable of oscillating between a promise of freedom and an instrument of alienation.