1980 AUGUST 2025 began with a chance discovery. At a flea market in Bazzano, Sergio Smerieri bought a second-hand scanner. Inside it was a USB stick containing seven photographs taken in the days following the Bologna massacre of 2 August 1980.

Another coincidence brought Smerieri and Jacopo Cenacchi together at the Vernacular Photography Festival in Guiglia. At the time, Galleria Studio Cenacchi was showing A Dear Friend, a work dedicated to ATC bus no. 37. Driven by Agide Melloni, the bus carried the dead and injured back and forth between Bologna railway station, devastated by the bomb, and the Maggiore Hospital. A Dear Friend went on to win the Fondazione CarisBo Collectors’ Award at the recent OpenTour, in the year marking the 45th anniversary of the massacre.

These chance connections led the curators to create a small publication, produced in a limited edition of 37 copies, and an exhibition devoted to the seven photographs. Taken in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the images had been left without a known history or author.

1980 AUGUST 2025 brings these photographs into public view. Without this unlikely sequence of encounters and discoveries, they might never have been seen at all.

Anonimo
1980 agosto 2025
30 July > 2 August 2025

31 July, 1 and 2 August: 4–7 pm
3–14 August and 26–30 August: by appointment
15–25 August: closed

GALLERIA STUDIO CENACCHI
Via Santo Stefano 63
40125 Bologna

OPENING HOURS
Tuesday–Saturday: 4.30–7.30 pm
Monday: by appointment
Sunday: closed