BEAUTIFUL BOOKS

TASCHEN: Massimo Listri. Italian Palaces

Beauty is Power

Where Stone Touches the Soul

November 2025

Düsseldorf, 2 November 2025 – There are places that breathe, even when no one is there. Massimo Listri knows them. In his new monumental work Italian Palaces (TASCHEN, 640 pages, £150), the master of architectural photography, born in Florence in 1953, opens the doors to Italy's treasures – from medieval fortresses to baroque dream worlds. This breathtaking book is a silent meditation on beauty, power and the magic of emptiness.

Listri, who has created an unmistakable signature style with over 70 books and exhibitions from the Morgan Library in New York to the Vatican Pinacoteca, makes people disappear from his pictures. What remains is the soul of the space: the whisper of marble, the gold of the ceilings, the light falling through centuries-old windows. His compositions are reminiscent of Candida Höfer – that cool precision that gives symmetry a voice – but Listri adds warmth. Colour, shadow, atmosphere. An empty hall becomes a stage on which the absence of its inhabitants reinforces their presence. Like Höfer, he makes the invisible visible, but with a touch of melancholy, as if the palaces were waiting for us.

The Italian sense of beauty

Beauty is power

Why are we so fascinated by these buildings? Because they are more than architecture. They are testimony to a time when beauty was power. The Italian nobility – Medici, Farnese, Borghese – built them not to live in, but to rule. Every palazzo is a manifesto: Carrara marble, frescoes by Carracci, crystal chandeliers from Murano, frozen like stars.

Baroque, born out of the Counter-Reformation, sought to convert and seduce – with drama, illusion and excess. Rococo added lightness. But why does it seem as if Italians have an innate sense of beauty? Because la bella figura is not just clothing, but a philosophy of life: from the Renaissance to the present day, culture has shaped harmony, proportion and elegance to permeate everyday life – a legacy of Vitruvius, Palladio and antiquity that lives on in every gesture, every espresso, every palazzo.

Listri guides us through many jewels. Among them: in the Palazzo Serra di Cassano in Naples, a late Baroque secret that is rarely opened, he captures the gilded ceilings, the hidden gardens where the scent of lemon fills the air, and reveals the Paterno-Castello dynasty. In the Palazzo Reale di Capodimonte, once the Bourbon residence and now a national museum, Caravaggio's shadows still dance, a monument to the Enlightenment that Charles III made the stage of his power.

The Palazzo Biscari in Catania, a Sicilian Baroque dream by Alonzo di Benedetto and Giuseppe Palazzotto, becomes a lava stone hall with frescoes by Scipione Li Volsi. And the Sala Grande in the Palazzo Milzetti in Faenza, ‘Tempio di Apollo’, a Rococo masterpiece with Apollo statues and golden ceilings, is captivated by Listri with Höfer-like intimacy: light and shadow invite meditation, as if the palace were breathing.

As in The World's Most Beautiful Libraries or Theatres, Listri brings the static to life. Italian Palaces is an invitation not only to look, but to feel, as art and beauty were not only intended for decoration, but to reign supreme.

This book awakens the spirit, enchants the soul and makes you want to travel to see these palaces once in your lifetime.

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