The Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna takes its work across the city with Open Tour 2025, a major exhibition programme hosted by galleries and independent venues. This year, Galleria Studio Cenacchi takes part with two exhibitions featuring work by students from the MA Photography programme.

On the gallery’s lower floor, Un caro amico, curated by Tommaso Bonaventura, is a collective project dedicated to the Bologna bombing of 2 August 1980.

At the heart of the exhibition is bus number 37, which was used to carry victims of the bombing on 2 August 1980. The work takes the form of a life-size black-and-white photograph of the vehicle, produced with a large-format camera. Measuring 10 metres long and 3 metres high, the image dominates the space, cutting across the gallery floor.

Three further elements accompany this imposing presence. The first is sound: a recording of the engine of the same bus running until 10.25 am, the exact time the bomb exploded, when it gives way to a respectful silence.

The second is a typewritten A4 sheet containing words taken from an interview with Agide Melloni, the man who drove the bus that day and who now remembers bus 37 as a ‘dear friend’. The words are layered over one another until the page becomes almost black — an image of the darkness left by that day.

The third is an A4 leporello in which the driver’s complete interview unfolds as an uninterrupted stream of words.

The students who took part in the project are Simone Acquaroli, Giovanni Andreotti, Gaia Battistelli, Federica Benati, Paula Di Vittorio, Jingrui Li, Shuo Li, Zezhou Li, Pietro Maoloni, Fausto Mattia Marino, Sonia Mazzavillani, Franco Melasecca, Yuliya Melekh, Pier Rocco Musillo, Alessandro Para, Roberto Righini, Simone Santacroce, Simona Sellitto, Mattia Simonetta, Yining Song, Francesca Toscano and Runqiong Xu.