"Befrag 'die Meere aller Zonen, befrag' den Seemann, der den Ozean durchstrich: - er kennt dies Schiff, das Schrecken aller Frommen: den fliegenden Holländer nennt man mich "* The Municipality of Macerata, in line with the cultural project of the Marche Region, gives voice to the contemporary with the exhibition The Flying Dutchman by the artist Fabrizio Cotognini, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first opera at the Sferisterio. Opera is one of the founding identities of the Macerata community which, over the years, with continuous experimentation and contamination, has contributed to promoting its diffusion internationally, and the theme chosen for the exhibition - the Flying Dutchman - testifies to it. The Flying Dutchman project will lead the visitor to move through the halls of the Civic Museums of Palazzo Buonaccorsi through play, narration, anthropology, contemporaneity, representation and obviously the music that sublimates everything: a synesthesia in pure form that has taken life in dialogue and work between the artist and the artisan realities of the Macerata area. In fact, Cotognini, born and raised in Macerata, through this project also wants to bring to light the expertise and mastery of the know-how of his land, redefining the boundaries of a new geo-localization of applied arts with a national and international scope, an operation made possible thanks to also to the support of the Santoni shoe factory in Corridonia (MC), main sponsor of the exhibition and example of Made in Marche in Italy and in the world. The artist offers his vision of the Flying Dutchman, the archetype par excellence of those who challenge himself and God to overcome limits, with a narrative path that winds through the rooms of the noble floor of Palazzo Buonaccorsi, one of the most important testimonies of the late Baroque. The exhibition, through an immersive journey consisting of drawings, sculptures and installations, proposes a conceptual transposition of a historical literary work, based on the various representations and interpretations that have been attributed over time to the Flying Dutchman.

In the collective imagination it becomes the ghost ship captained by Davy Jones and Will Turner in the film Pirates of the Caribbean, but it is also the drama of August Strindberg. As well as the song by Jethro Tull, which tells of the impetuous fulfillment of the adverse fate of those who will not change their way of acting: "you will be the Dutchman / Floating slowly towards the sea / In a misty suffering". It is the comic Uncle Scrooge and the ghost ship, and comes true in the events of the Silver Surfer and in the famous American cartoon The Simpson (Frying Dutchman). But it will also become the nickname of the footballers Marco van Basten and Robin van Persie, and again, the novel by Joe Lansdale and Enrico Palandri, as we read it in the works of Osvaldo Licini, Willem van de Velde, Anselm Kiefer and Andreas Achenbach. Fabrizio Cotognini collects all these representations of the Flying Dutchman and gives them a voice within a timeless story. The Flying Dutchman by Fabrizio Cotognini is no longer, and not only, Richard Wagner's Der Fliegende Hollander, performed for the first time at the Königlich Sächsisches Hoftheater in Dresden on January 2, 1843, but it is a choral work that tells of a social transformation , a radical renewal of society, combining visions, quotes, tributes, discoveries and rediscoveries by novelists, poets, playwrights, singers, cartoonists, film directors and artists. Within a conception of cyclical time, where the historical-literary tradition rises from its ashes in the eternal search for actuality, Fabrizio Cotognini gives shape to a unique, inclusive and at the same time imaginative sensory experience where it is possible to recognize oneself in the legendary and archetypal figure of the Flying Dutchman.