Making the Metro Beautiful

Fabrizio’s half-day tour, “The Art Stations of Naples,” shows you the art in the metro stations that got built. This full day goes further — besides the art-filled metro stations, to tell you the story of the works that never left the studio. Two curators ran the project: Achille Bonito Oliva for the art, Alessandro Mendini for the architecture — and architecture came first. So the artists didn't always have a free hand. Some had to fight to see their work built; some works were changed; some were abandoned. Fabrizio was inside that process, and over the years he drew up his own proposals — models and renderings — for works that did make it into the stations, and some that didn't. The day opens with the half-day route between the harbor and the old town, then continues over lunch onto the quieter stations of the hillside line. Along the way, Fabrizio tells the story only he can: what it took to put fine art forty meters underground, and what almost went there instead.

Fabrizio was inside the project from its very early years, an architect himself, working directly with the artists who had to learn a city where, in some cases, they had never built for before. He translated what sat above ground into something each artist could use below, standing between their vision and the place it would actually go on to live. Spanning a full day, this experience reaches stations farther from the center, ones a shorter visit rarely has time to cover, giving you a much broader sense of how far the project actually spread across the whole city and into its own neighborhoods, well beyond the usual and renowned stops. Fabrizio's insider perspective enriches the stops, underground and above ground alike. He can share anecdotes unknown to anyone who has not worked on these projects, show you sketches and models of works never built or still unfinished, walk you through how those unfinished pieces will come together, and tell you the stories behind them.

Fabrizio holds a PhD in Architectural Design and taught at the School of Architecture of the Bari Polytechnic. His research has focused on the relationship between art and architecture. For more than twenty-five years, he has worked in Naples and Milan as an independent producer and coordinator for artists, galleries, and cultural institutions — among them the Lia Rumma and Studio Trisorio galleries, Hangar Bicocca in Milan, the Madre and Capodimonte museums in Naples, and Artecinema, Naples' international festival of film on art and architecture. During this time, he has worked closely with more than thirty artists across generations. It was this work that brought him inside the Art Stations project, alongside figures like William Kentridge, Joseph Kosuth, and Rebecca Horn. As a guide, he offers what that history gave him: an interpretation of Naples through its stones and its people — the artists, architects, and neighborhoods the works were built into.

Comfortable shoes — a full day on your feet through the stations and on and off the metro, with escalators and stairs. Water in the warmer months.