Nostalgia Modernità di un sentimento dal Rinascimento al Contemporaneo

The volume is the catalogue of the exhibition presented at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa from 25 April to 1 September 2024. In 1688, the Alsatian-born student Johannes Hofer graduated in medicine in Basel with a thesis on a hitherto ignored pathology, for which he coined a new term: nostalgia, or “the sadness generated by the ardent desire to return to one’s homeland”. Through the formal and iconographic suggestions of an artistic journey that starts from the Renaissance and comes down to the present day, the different expressions of nostalgia are recounted here and their history reconstructed. This provides documentation of the archetypes and protagonists of this medical disorder, which has progressively developed into an ambivalent and contradictory feeling, individual and collective, present in the history of humanity at all geographic and cultural latitudes.