Professor Franco Baldasso Organizes Exhibition in Sicily of Painter Corrado Cagli

Franco Baldasso, associate professor of Italian and director of the Study Abroad Program in Italy, has served as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome since 2019. Through his work with the Academy—and in collaboration with the Babilonia School in Taormina, Sicily—Baldasso was artistic director for the recently-concluded exhibition, Corrado Cagli: Nostoi. Rome New York Taormina, which followed painter Corrado Cagli’s journey through those three cities. Cagli was a key member of the “New Roman School of Painting,” also called "Scuola romana," a group of Expressionist painters active in Rome before the outbreak of World War II. Cagli, who was Jewish and queer, later fled to New York, where he enlisted in the US Army before returning to Italy in 1948.

The exhibition focused on Cagli’s return to Italy and the international ties he maintained with such figures as Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine. At the center of the show was Tempo D'amore, a 1946 drawing Cagli originally gifted to Stravinsky, and which later landed in the collection of the American Academy in Rome. Baldasso facilitated its inclusion in the presentation. “This exhibition was born out of many conversations, in the true spirit of Corrado Cagli," said Baldasso, "who throughout his career passionately engaged in collaborative works with artists, poets, and musicians, crossing disciplines and boundaries."
 

Post Date: 11-11-2026