I consider my work, in all its meanings, a chamber of wonders enclosing everything that arouses amazement and wonder in me. I find it peculiar that camera, the English word for ‘cinepresa’, recalls the Italian word for chamber: after all, it allows you to capture, store and keep, thus vanquishing the concept of death in a completely random way.
Stefano Bessoni

Stefano Bessoni is one of the most eclectic and original talents of Italian cinema. Cinema - the auteur, visionary kind - is the starting point in the construction of an artistic and visual imagination contaminated by graphics, illustration, literature, comics, fairy tales, drawing, science fiction, entomology.
The resulting illustrations, presented in these pages, are a highly original cross-section of his complex Wunderkammer, between eccentric fairy tales and inexact sciences.
There are two privileged keys to this journey: on the one hand, five emblematic stories, of people who really existed, pioneers capable of rewriting the history of science, cinema and architecture in their own way. From Charles Darwin with his evolutionary theories, to Cesare Lombroso with his studies on phrenological heads, from Alessandro Antonelli, a sort of 19th-century Archistar, to Maria Adriana Prolo a non-conformist young lady of 20th-century cinema, to Bessoni's master of cinema par excellence, Peter Greenaway. On the other hand, the world of fairy tales, the realm of fantasy and the impossible that becomes possible, from Alice to Pinocchio, from the Wizard of Oz to Pierino Porcospino, all stories united by a preponderant dark, irrational and sometimes macabre side.

The volume includes a series of critical essays, a first-person interview with the artist and biographical apparatus.


Contents

Stefano Bessoni's Chamber of Wonders
Domenico De Gaetano

Kunstkamera, Weltanschauung and a Pinch of Garbage Pail Kids
Alfredo Accatino

Pinocchio and Beyond...
Santo Alligo

The Subversive Beauty of Diversities
Telmo Pievani

Science Fairy Tale
Ivan Cenzi

Stefano Bessoni about himself
edited by Claudia Gianetto and Marco Grifo

Biography