Poverty as an art of living
100 years since the birth of Father Costantino Ruggeri
Pavia, Horti - Extra Art | 16 October 2025, 6 p.m.
On the occasion of the centenary of Father Costantino Ruggeri's birth (1925-2025), the Frate Sole Foundation, in collaboration with Almo Collegio Borromeo, proposes the meeting "Poverty as an art of living", which will be held on Thursday 16 October 2025 at 6 p.m. at Horti - Extra Art, Lungo Ticino Sforza 46 - Pavia.
The meeting invites us to reflect on poverty not as deprivation, but as a conscious choice of freedom, authenticity and openness to others.
A theme that runs deep through the life and work of Father Costantino Ruggeri, Franciscan friar and artist, for whom art was first and foremost a way of praying and listening, capable of uniting the material and the spirit, the everyday and the mystery.
Three voices will offer different but complementary perspectives on this spiritual and creative dimension:
- Father Pasquale Ghezzi, The art of making bread, will tell of poverty as a Eucharistic gesture and gift of self.
- Don Roberto Tagliaferri, The light of the Gospel among the poor in missionwill explore the presence of the divine in the last and marginal places of the world.
- Alessandro Beltrami, journalist, with Beauty stripped bare: the way of arte povera, will explore the link between simplicity, essentiality and truth of the creative act.
The meeting will be moderated by Andrea Vaccari of the Frate Sole Foundation, who will lead the dialogue between the different experiences, in a confrontation combining spirituality, art and everyday life.
This will be followed at 7.30 p.m. by the opening of the exhibition "The Transparent.
Selection for Horti', with speeches by:
Alberto Lolli, Rector of the Almo Collegio Borromeo and Director of Horti,
e Luigi LeoniPresident of the Brother Sun Foundation.
The exhibition presents a selection of works by Father Costantino Ruggeri, belonging to the cycle of the 'Transparent'left on loan for use in the Horti - Extra Art in Pavia.
After the reflection on the Crucifixion still in progress in Pavia Cathedral, this second stage continues the itinerary dedicated to the artist friar, shifting attention to light as the symbol of a poverty experienced as freedom and gift.
From 1974 Father Costantino Ruggeri dedicated himself to the creation of his famous Transparentluminous and delicate shapes, obtained by assembling mouth-blown glass panes from disused windows, to which he applied paper, plastic sheets, cobwebs and prints, in a continuous dialogue between matter and light.
The original lead binding, in some cases retained, became an integral part of the composition, transforming what was fragment and waste into a new visual unit.
These works are fragile and intense, made of poor, translucent materials, in which light becomes matter and fragility becomes form.
In these fragments, which seem to emerge from silence, poverty reveals itself as the art of living and loving, as the way to the essential, to that beauty that only comes from gift and gratuitousness.
Of the 126 Transparenti conserved at the Frate Sole Foundation and catalogued by the Lombardy Region in the SIRBeC system, only a few are exhibited on this occasion, as a precious testimony of an artistic and spiritual quest that transforms light into language and matter into prayer.
The spaces of Horti - Extra Art, a meeting place for art, nature and community, offer the ideal context for this reflection: an environment in which the aesthetic experience becomes an opportunity for listening, contemplation and regeneration.
Horti - Extra Art, Lungo Ticino Sforza 46 - Pavia
16 October 2025, 6 p.m.
Free entrance - every day
Brother Sun Foundation
+39 0382 32279
segreteria@fondazionefratesole.org
www.fondazionefratesole.org
For information and registration:
