I’ve got to come clean. A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to the Northern Italian town of Reggio Emilia for an art show. And honestly, I’d never heard of it.
On my return, I took a deep breath and prepared to explain to friends where I’d been. But then last week Catherine, Princess of Wales, did me a solid by making an official royal visit; her first abroad since her cancer diagnosis.
Out-there artwork
Kate may be a princess, but it’s my article, so I’ll go first. I was thrilled to be invited by Collezione Maramotti, a modern, foundation-run art space, for the opening of Heaven’s Truth, a solo show by French artist Ndayé Kouagou.
Themed around cardboard cut-outs of people in fetish dog masks, it was pretty out-there stuff. But ultimately it had a deep and persuasive point to make about our polarised society, and I left enthused and enlivened.
This opening coincided with Fotografia Europea, the city’s annual photography festival, so I got to experience that as well. And what blew me away wasn’t just the work itself, by artists from across the continent, but the specific way that Reggio Emilia staged it.
Rather than anodyne white walls, I moved through palaces, cloisters and gritty, independent spaces dominated by peeling plaster and colourful patina. And it truly gave me a lift. I got the instant sense that art here isn’t an elite activity, but genuinely for the people. Something this city simply does, all the time, in an entirely natural and relaxed manner.
This could, admittedly, be disorienting. Standing in the ochre courtyard of Atelier ViaDueGobbiTre, for example, I couldn’t tell whether I’d wandered into a squat, a community centre or a performance art space.
The answer turned out to be none of the above, or perhaps all three: it’s a collectively owned building where resident artists live and work, which throws open its five floors to the public during Fotografia Europea.
Artworks were pinned to peeling yellow walls, hung across stairwells and tucked into studios that visitors were welcome to enter. Visitors wandered around at random, mingling with artists and residents in a laid back way where you genuinely couldn’t tell who was who.
The space felt alive, and the art was part of that life rather than just something hanging on a wall. Here’s how the collective describe their project: “In a time marked by closure, the opening of the Ateliers becomes a political as well as a cultural gesture: an invitation to inhabit together, even if only for the duration of a visit, the ghosts of our daily lives.” Quite.
A radical tradition
None of this is by accident. Reggio Emilia sits at the heart of Italy’s “red belt,” a stretch of territory governed by the Italian Communist Party for much of the postwar period and where cooperative businesses and a strong commitment to public art remain steeped in the culture.
Which brings us neatly to the Reggio Emilia educational approach, developed after World War Two by pedagogist Loris Malaguzzi. Its central idea is that children possess “a hundred languages”, including painting, sculpture, drama, music and play – and they should all be developed and taken seriously.
This isn’t just a theory, but has been enthusiastically put into practice in Reggio Emilia. So much so that by 1991, Newsweek had rated the city’s schools among the best in the world. So it wasn’t surprising that Princess Catherine, who has a strong interest on early childhood education, would wish to check it out.
Having visited the city myself, this makes perfect sense to me. Because what the Reggio approach to education, Fotografia Europea and Collezione Maramotti all have in common is that creativity is not a “nice to have”, but a fundamental human need. And that how it’s embedded in public life (its schools, its spaces, its culture) says a lot about how you think society should be.
The following week, by the way, I went to Ibiza Art Weekend and hit the superclubs. So here’s hoping the Duchess of Cambridge continues to take inspiration from my travels, and will soon be throwing shapes on the floor of [Univers]. We can but dream.
Heaven’s Truth is at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, until 26 July. Fotografia Europea 2026 runs across multiple venues in Reggio Emilia until 14 June 2026.