The exhibition Ottocento fotografa il Medioevo (Nineteenth Century Photographs the Middle Ages) traces the important role played by photography in the history of the protection of artistic and architectural heritage, and more generally in the formation of a shared culture and taste around which to build national identity. An identity constituted, on the wave of the first phase of Italian colonial expansion, also by processes of orientalisation and othering phenomena linked to racial stereotypes and fantasies of domination and civilisation.

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