Mario Dondero Terminal is a place of arrivals and departures, thought and realised to offer hospitality in the sign of art and culture.
A cultural and artistic outpost located at the entrance of the town, with modern and fluid architectural lines well integrated in the natural treasure chest of Fermo’s hills.
Mario Dondero Terminal is a place of arrivals and departures, thought and realised to offer hospitality in the sign of art and culture.
Designed by Carmassi studio in Milan and built at the end of the Nineties, Mario Dondero Terminal was left unfinished and mainly unused until December 2019, when, by the order of the town administration, it was reconstructed and given back to the community as multifunctional space for contemporary art, and named after the internationally renowned photojournalist Mario Dondero, who chose Fermo as main residence for the last years oh his life.
His presence is always alive in the Terminal thanks to a famous sentence by him:
I know well that everything can be invented, built, faked. We live in the reign of the doubles, of the theories about the original’s disappearance, of the second lives. But if we accepted the principle that the false is more compliant to reality than the true, then the respect to the world would fall, to what really happens in it.
Mario Dondero (Milan 1928 – Petritoli 2015) was one of the most original figures of the contemporary photojournalism. He worked since the early Fifties with L’Avanti, l’Unità, Milano Sera. As of 1955 he moved to Paris to work with L’Espresso, L’Illustrazione Italiana, Le Monde, Le Nouvel Observateur, Regards and then with the magazines Jeune Afrique, Afrique-Asie, Demain l’Afrique.
Passionate about radiophony, he worked with the Italian section of BBC and he hosted many programmes by and for Radio3 (Rai) dedicated to the history of photojournalism (2012-2013). He exhibited his photographs in many Italian and foreign cities.
Famous for his civil and social loyalty, he documented the Emergency medical teams’ work in Afghanistan In 2015 the documentary “Calma e gesso – in viaggio con Mario Dondero” by the director and anthropologist Marco Cruciani tells five years next to the photographer, travelling through his adventurous and legendary story crossing the main social, political, cultural and artistic events during the second half of the 20 century.
The structure inside is functioning and modern and it is divided into two areas: a host area with the IAT, an information point of the transport company STEAT and a café with a refreshment point, the other area as exhibition space for meetings and exhibitions.
An area of the Terminal is permanently dedicated to the famous artist Sandro Trotti from Fermo who in 2016 offered to the town more than one hundred works, paintings and drawings as a gift, realized during his brilliant and prestigious career from the end of the Fifties.
Awaiting the foundation of a museum fund dedicated to him, the City wanted to pay homage to the artist exhibiting an important selection of paintings in a space like the Terminal, destined to contemporary art.
Sandro Trotti (1934-1998) was born in Monte Urano in 1934, he studied in Rome where during the Seventies, he taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti, keeping on exhibiting both in Italy and abroad, applauded by both the public and the critics.
His artistic path is made of experiences of matter where sign and colour, together with daring technical experimentations, migrate from the abstraction to the informal. Centre of his inspiration is the model, Rome and the Orient, together with our lyric landscapes of Marche, with its green hills that roll smoothly to the sea, on which lively beaches and herds cover almost the entire canvas’ surface in flowing lines.
The political thirty square metres painting La Marcia dell’umanità is also part of the donation. It is exhibited in Piazza Sagrini, a nice complex of the former spinning mill, who was subjected to an interesting restoration of industrial archaeology.
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