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Bodies emerging from shadow, light carving skin like ancient marble. The Nicola Del Roscio Foundation presents the most extensive retrospective ever devoted to Elio Luxardo’s nude photography, bringing to light a bold and hidden chapter of Italian visual culture. Born in Brazil to Italian parents and arriving in Rome in the 1930s, Luxardo embodies the tension of an era suspended between ideological rigidity and creative freedom. While Fascist Italy imposed strict limits on public life, the young photographer honed his language behind the scenes of Cinecittà, portraying stars of the “white telephone cinema" and experimenting in his studio with a personal, refined, and provocative aesthetic. In these images, never intended for the market, male and female bodies converse as complementary opposites: athletic strength and elusive sensuality, heroic masculinity and femininity far from domestic dogma. Enchanted by classical sculpture, Luxardo shaped light like bronze, transforming his models into presences poised between myth and modernity. Considered too daring for the standards of the time, these photographs remained hidden for decades, today they resurface as a rediscovered treasure, revealing to the public the secret elegance and daring poetry of a Master who captured the eternal in a single instant.