The exhibition guides visitors in the several literary references animating the stories of Pratt: from Jack London and the American adventure literature to Joseph Conrad, from the poetry of W. The exhibition will not show only Corto Maltese but also Anna the Jungle (1959), Ernie Pike (1961), The Justice of the Wathee of Sg.t Kirk (1955), and the amazing tables and watercolours of the Scorpions of the Desert leading the visitor–traveller in the 1941-1942 Ethiopia, where references to historical figures overlap with imaginary characters. Born on a beach in Rimini in 1927, wandered globetrotter but entirely Venetian, he has managed to combine and return to the reader-dreamer the importance of the sea, the game of mirrors, the theme of imagination and reality, the typical atmospheres of picaresque literature, dangerous women, abstract art and photographic realism.

Hugo Pratt, connoisseur of men and peoples, world traveller, actor, guitarist, but above all designer of an imaginary literature without borders, has given us some of the most beautiful pages of plots between fiction and history of the ‘900 in a never predictable romantic adventurer vision.

Corto was born in La Valletta, Malta, in 1887, of a British sailor and an Andalusian gypsy he was one metre eighty-three centimetres tall, with eyes of the colour of honey and a ring in his left ear, romantic sailor and extemporary gentleman that caught the imagination of generations of readers.Īs a show within the show, in a dedicated room of the museum, the 164 original drawings of the Ballad of the Salt Sea, the classic of the designed literary where Corto appears for the first time, are exhibited together for the third time since they were created in 1967. In collaboration with CMS.Cultura, with the curatorship of Patrizia Zanotti and with the support of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, the exhibition will show over 400 works celebrating Hugo Pratt and his alter ego Corto Maltese: a real literary myth of the Twentieth century, an anti-hero, a modern Ulysses able to make us travel in the most fascinating places and let us rediscover some of the major episodes and protagonists of the history of the Twentieth century. Museum of the History of Bologna, the great exhibition “Hugo Pratt and Corto Maltese.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Corto Maltese, Genus Bononiae hosts from 4 November 2016 to 19 March 2017, at Palazzo Pepoli.

Corto maltese collection