From June 9th to July 17th, in the suggestive space of Terrazza a Mare in Lignano Sabbiadoro, there will be the exhibition "CINEMA IN BIKINI. Italiani al mare: manifesti 1949-1999", curated by Andrea Tomasetig and Enrico Minisini. Thanks to the extensive Minisini Collection, of which about one hundred posters, playbills and photocopies are on display, the exhibition offers a cross-section of Italy and Italians from the mid-twentieth century to the threshold of the new millennium through the all-Italian strand of the so-called "seaside cinema". The heart of the exhibition is the section dedicated to the 1950s and 1960s, an age of more widespread affluence, of the "economic boom", and fervent for Italian-style comedy. All the famous actors and the most popular stars, from Alberto Sordi - who will take a house in Lignano in Pineta - to Ugo Tognazzi, Walter Chiari, Aldo Fabrizi, Totò, Franco and Ciccio, Raimondo Vianello, Vittorio Gassman and many popular singers, such as Mina, Ornella Vanoni, Jimmy Fontana, Miranda Martino, Gianni Meccia, and Enrico Polito, who were called upon to interpret the summer's 'tormentones' - one above all Edoardo Vianello's Gun Fins and Glasses in the 1963 film Canzoni... in bikinis by Giuseppe Vari in 1963 - were important presences in these films, which gradually defined the typical characters of the lifeguard, the womanizing commander, the playboy, the girl in search of a husband, the wives at the seaside and the husbands in the city, under the banner of humour and comedy. With the 1970s, the seaside theme evolved into more sexually explicit films and then into the cinepanettoni, typical of the Vanzina brothers in the 1980s and 1990s, and in communication there was a shift from drawn posters to photographic posters, as well as from bikinis to topless. The exhibition ends with the poster of a film symbolising Italian society on holiday at the seaside in the mid-1990s: Paolo Virzì's 1996 Ferie d'agosto. A rich catalogue with texts by Stefano Salis and curators Andrea Tomasetig and Enrico Minisini, which illustrates the Minisini Collection in relation to the theme of seaside cinema, completes the exhibition. Admission to the exhibition is free and opening hours are every day, from 9 June to 17 July, from 19.00 to 24.00. For information: Tel. (+39) 0431 409160 - biblio@lignano.org - www.lignano.org.
