Massimo Vitali

For over thirty years, Massimo Vitali has watched the world from above.

From the height of a large-format camera set six metres off the ground, he waits for people to build the image that best captures the ordinariness of our lives.

Gathering places like beaches, swimming pools, concerts and clubs become the stage for a piece of theatre and, at the same time, the subject of an anthropological study. This is how Massimo Vitali became one of the most important figures on the contemporary art scene.

His work is now held in some of the world's leading museum collections, from the Guggenheim in New York to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, from the Reina Sofía in Madrid to the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, and in 2025 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lucie Foundation.

For most of his career, Vitali has observed the scene from the outside.

This day begins with a question: what happens when the author steps into the scene, and you step in with him?

For Scuola della Luce, Massimo Vitali has chosen to answer in person. Not with a workshop, a portfolio review or a masterclass, but by personally inviting participants into the place that matters most to an artist: his own studio.

Like a conductor, Vitali will set the tempo for the whole day, without following a rigid score: the only recurring theme will be the art of creation, understood as something to share, to talk about and explore together.

A walk with the author through his universe, an encounter in the most intimate places of his daily life: from the studio, Vitali will take the group to Lucca for lunch together, before opening up an even more personal dimension, that of his own home.

Participants will be welcomed into a space normally reserved for loved ones, friends and family. If the studio is the place of work and research, the home is where identity shows itself most directly: a refuge, the place where the artist is defined not by his work but by the habits and thoughts that shape him outside the public eye, when no one is watching.

This, then, is what it means to step into the scene with Massimo Vitali: an experience open to twenty people, an invitation into the physical and mental space of a great artist, not for a technical lesson, but to put human relationships and dialogue first.