Welcome to the rooms of an exhibition that does not exist: it is populated by 99 objects, rare and eccentric memorabilia, often never seen before. An unprecedented and visual foray into the artistic imagination, in the broadest sense, of one of the best-known and most translated writers on the contemporary Italian scene: Alessandro Baricco.

‘The Baricco book’, edited by Annalisa Ambrosio and Paolo di Paolo, orchestrates a wealth of unpredictable or unobtainable material: from photographs taken at his studio-laboratory in Turin to the promotional bottle of wine from “Emmaus”, from the Umanofono in Castelli di rabbia to the map in ‘The game’, from the Bowie knife in the novel Abel to his Rolleiflex camera, via the album City Reading composed with the famous French electronic duo Air and his embrace with Angelina Jolie the day after the release of the film Without a Trace.

This ideal catalogue of an exhibition that does not exist presents, for the first time, in an organic and unexpected way, the sequence of gestures that led Alessandro Baricco to always arrive “a quarter of an hour early”, in his own words, compared to numerous trends that have appeared in the Italian literary scene (and beyond) from the 1990s to the present day.