Unfolded Ways

Rome, as Art Speaks It

Synesthesia is the simultaneous experience of multiple senses: seeing a sound, touching a colour, hearing a shape. It is a deep perceptual state, where boundaries blur and sensations intertwine.

To mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, D’ORO Collection has created a work that activates this sensory synergy: Unfolded Ways. Rome as Never Read Before is a 25-stop journey through the city of Rome, where art, photography, and literature converge in a single expressive gesture.

For this special occasion, the publishing house invited internationally renowned artistic voices to offer a personal, layered, and shared vision of the city—through a visual and textual narrative that crosses multiple languages of expression.

Portraits of Rome: 25 Artistic Visions

Curated by Valentino Catricalà, Unfolded Ways takes shape as a paper-based exhibition—a museum without walls. The volume brings together works by 25 of the most influential voices in contemporary art, each offering a powerful and unrepeatable vision of Rome: Franco Angeli, José Angelino, Matteo Basilé, Elisabetta Benassi, Silvia Camporesi, Paolo Canevari, Gea Casolaro, Christo, Iginio De Luca, Rä Di Martino, Tano Festa, Bill Fontana, Nancy Genn, Auriea Harvey, Anaïs Horn, H.H. Lim, Renato Mambor, Vincenzo Marsiglia, Mimmo Paladino, Vettor Pisani, Quayola, Marinella Senatore, Federico Solmi, Mauro Staccioli, Helen Tóth.

The visions collected in Unfolded Ways arise from a profound connection with Rome: each artist observes, deciphers, and reimagines the city. Together, their works form a visual atlas—a new grammar of Rome’s contemporary imaginary.

Squary Eyes Presents: An Imaginary Rome on Paper

Alongside this iconic selection, between printed streets and hand-stitched pages, a suspended world unfolds: the Red Theatre—a fantastical stage inhabited by eccentric characters and surreal visions.

Created exclusively for D’ORO Collection by the international art collective Squary Eyes, born from Tokyo’s underground Sofubi scene, this universe takes shape through 25 paper theatres, where every visual element becomes part of a contemporary dramaturgy.

Each of the 25 original works reproduces the stage dimensions of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma at a 1:100 scale, forming a paper-based scenic city: an imaginative mirror where narrative breaks free from realism to reinvent itself in a fairy-tale form.

A one-of-a-kind project, seamlessly integrated into the volume, where fragments of the grand installation—figures, silhouettes, stage sets—emerge among the pages, animating them from within.

A City to Read, a Book to Journey Through

Unfolded Ways is a passage through art in its many languages—an act of collective creation in which each artist interprets Rome as a space of memory, myth, and modernity. Here, one reads the work of an entire creative community, united by the desire to express their vision of Rome through forms, symbols, and imagined worlds.