The exhibition is offered not in the Vatican Museums but within the city itself, more precisely in the Apostolic Library. To access it, you must enter the city-state through the Porte Sainte-Anne, a large door through which Vatican employees enter. You will pass the Swiss Guards, the Post Office and then the bank, before entering the Belvedere Court and the Vatican Library. It’s quite new!
But beware, entry is limited only two days a week and only two hours until February 25, 2022. You have to earn this visit to discover the Roman artist Pietro Ruffo, 43, who has already exhibited around the world . This architect works on several materials but often paper and drawing. It superimposes natural landscapes and human forms, geographic maps and constellations.
For the Vatican, now organizing exhibitions in the library is a way of dialoguing with the present, as explained by the cardinal archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church. “The Vatican is a cultural state, explains Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonca, we bring together the tradition, the past – of which we are the guardians – with the questions, the dramas, the hopes of the present time. These questions are brought up by the Roman artist Pietro Ruffo who values the human dimension in a great reflection on the current world! “
And the artist was able to access the archives of the Vatican library which lists 180,000 archival manuscripts, 9,000 incunabula which are books printed before the 16th century. Pietro Ruffo even made discoveries like a parchment map of the Nile which is 5.50m long and over 300 years old. “We had never unrolled it, even the conservatives of the Vatican did not know this map, says Pietro Ruffo. The first time I saw her, right away, she told me the story of hundreds of people from different parts of the world, crossing their stories on the shores of the Nile. “
Pietro Ruffo then produced his own card of the same length and they respond to each other in the showroom. He called it “The Blue Nile”, it is a moving humanity which converges towards the banks of the river. Migratory flows and the safeguard of the planet, current themes that Pietro Ruffo worked on in the continuity of the two encyclicals of Pope Francis, his major texts, Laudato Si on ecology and Fratelli Tutti on the culture of encounter.