On Lake Massaciuccoli in Torre del Lago, around the composer Giacomo Puccini, a group of poor and free painters, anarchists and rebels, of undisputed talent, had formed. Plinio Nomellini, Ferruccio Pagni, Francesco Fanelli, Raffaello Gambogi, Angiolo and Ludovico Tommasi, Lorenzo Viani, called themselves Club la Bohème and gathered in the Gambe di Merlo hut, near the house where the musician lived in 1891 in Torre del Lago, which at the time was an almost wild land, inhabited by about 300 people. Ferruccio Pagni from Livorno (Livorno, 1866 – Torre del Lago, 1935), was among the first members of the Club, a friend and confidant of Giacomo Puccini, and depicted the landscapes and atmospheres of the lake landscape in his paintings of divisionist ancestry, rich in light and color. The aim of the exhibition is to narrate the pictorial story of Ferruccio Pagni, a great friend of Maestro Puccini, but also to place the figure of a great man from Lucca, Giacomo Puccini, at the centre of attention on the occasion of the centenary of his death, not only reconstructing the relationships that the composer had with the artists of his time, but above all outlining the characteristics of a widespread aesthetic that, in Italy between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, had multiple expressions both in painting and sculpture (from Scapigliatura to Orientalism, from Symbolism to Art Nouveau), and in music, and especially in that of Puccini.
