The exhibition inaugurates a new space of Villa Malpensata entirely dedicated to photography and named after the famous scholar, traveller and photographer Fosco Maraini (1912-2004). The MUSEC’s interest in photography, consolidated in the “Esovisioni” project for over a decade, now finds a prestigious “space” dedicated to it. In the exhibition, one has the opportunity to observe around forty photographs by great authors, accompanied by a multivision, photo albums and vintage objects that illustrate the relationship between a taste for the exotic and photography. Although it has always existed, exoticism found its most intense manifestation in European culture between the 19^th and 20^th century. The affirmation of colonialism and the West’s lasting contact with the most distant landscapes and peoples provoked an inexorable encounter/clash, with contradictory shades and often dramatic outcomes, which, however, only touched the substance of the imaginaries. In some ways, the awareness of the rapid loss of original contexts produced the attempt, as naive as it was poetic, to keep cultural singularities alive – through literature and art – even when it was clear that they were about to disappear or had already disappeared. In this context, the emerging of photography played a fundamental role, moving between the ideological attempt to objectively document reality and its transformations and the emotional need to retain memory: an unconscious desire to relive the inexpressible well-being generated by emotions. The photography of exoticism was thus both a producer and a product of the aesthetics of nostalgia for an object that seems to disappear at the very moment it is portrayed.