Cometa
Verona 37121
Italy
At Palazzo Maffei in Verona, a new site-specific installation located in the scenic spiral staircase welcomes visitors: a dialogue between art and architecture that stems from the dreamlike poetry of Anna Galtarossa, along with the “Sound Echoes” by Oscar-winner Nicolas Becker.
Located in the heart of Verona, in the historic Piazza delle Erbe, where the Roman Forum once stood, Palazzo Maffei—with its scenographic Baroque façade, grand helical self-supporting staircase, stuccoes and frescoes on the main floors, and a stunning panoramic terrace—is an extraordinary place of art and culture.
The Museum of Palazzo Maffei offers an eclectic journey spanning more than four thousand years, from antiquity to the present day, showcasing over 700 masterpieces and curiosities born from the collecting passion of Luigi Carlon, a Veronese entrepreneur and art collector, where works engage in a dialogue across the arts—painting, sculpture, architecture, and applied arts—and feature artists such as Canova, Hokusai, Picasso, Modigliani, De Chirico, Magritte, Warhol, Mantegna, van Wittel, and many others.
Since its opening, Palazzo Maffei has continued to preserve the voices of the past, piecing together fragments of the artistic universe and bringing back to Verona artworks once scattered around the world. At the same time, it never stops looking to the present, embracing the stimuli of contemporary art and fostering artistic creation and reflection.
Following the projects by Maurizio Nannucci, Chiara Dynys, and Claire Fontaine, as well as the immersive works created by Manuel Gardina using artificial intelligence and by CamerAnebbia studio, Cometa by Anna Galtarossa—specifically conceived for the main staircase of Palazzo Maffei—continues the virtuous dialogue between the museum’s spaces, the collection assembled by Luigi Carlon displayed according to the museographic project by Gabriella Belli, and contemporary creativity.
Cometa by Anna Galtarossa
Critical text: Andrea Lissoni
There is no stillness in the works of Anna Galtarossa. They stir, vibrate, shift trajectory. They no longer race toward a destination but build orbits, trace rotations. They draw us into a hypnotic motion, as if art were a solar system whose center is always elsewhere. Over time, this movement has evolved: once vectors launched toward places suspended between the real and the imaginary, the works have become circular trajectories—slow revolutions that do not carry us away but accompany us.
Cometa is the new installation commissioned by Palazzo Maffei in Verona for the museum’s grand staircase. A suspended sculpture, a comet with a thirteen-meter tail that turns slowly. The title functions as a metonymy: it promises the swiftness of a celestial body crossing the horizon but instead reveals itself as a vertical counterclockwise motion within the monumental stairwell. Described this way, Cometa might evoke a visionary monument—a rotating structure like Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1917). Yet in Galtarossa’s work, references— though rich and deliberate—never become monumental quotations.
In Verona, the comet holds industrial and raw materials, colorful fragments, dancing elements that radiate a fairy-like and domestic energy—fragile and popular. Its trajectory is not ascending but descending: a slow fall directed toward the statue of Flora at the foot of the stairs, almost brushing it, suspended on the edge of an impact that never occurs.
In this gravitational waltz, sound echoes, voices, and distant music emerge and vanish—acoustic specters composed by Nicolas Becker. His score moves like an unsteady breath, oscillating between unease and consolation, between premonition and memory.
The shimmering, colorful journey Cometa proposes is that of a monument to the present: it celebrates neither heroism nor accomplished revolutions but opens to hypotheses, fantasies, ancestral games whose rules we no longer know. It is an imaginative device dancing between past and future, an invitation to still believe in imagination. In its slow rotation, it invites us to take part, to look together, to let ourselves be carried away, to be hypnotized, to believe in visions.
Revolution is not a finished act but a motion that continues—collective, luminous.
