The Municipality of Milan has launched throughout 2018 a program dedicated to the Italian twentieth century, declined in all artistic and cultural expressions that have animated the century just spent in our country. The vocation of the palinsest will be as always characterized by an inclusive and multidisciplinary approach, and will welcome cultural proposals centered on currents and artists that have been protagonists of the Italian twentieth century in various ways, but also reflections and insights on topics and characters that are there related.

(from a letter of june 26, 2017, of the Councilor Filippo Del Corno)

The Vittorio Mazzucconi Foundation has proposed a contribution with the following title:

THE ARK OF MAN

The history of the twentieth century is to be rewritten. It is not just an event that opened the century with the generous impulse of the vanguards; which, with futurism, has been exalted in an futuristic style modernity; which then turned to the nostalgia of classical art; that, after the last war, it opened to a sudden internationalization; who shared the trends, the provocations, the madness of the market and finally the zeroing of each true art; in parallel with the materialistic drift of our time, up to the resulting nothingness.
In the second half of the century however started a contrary movement, which has rediscovered the forgotten soul, a true painting, attentive to man, a poetic architecture, a rethinking the city in the light of art, a philosophy free from a sterile self-referentiality, a new religious feeling.
History does not still speaks of all this, yet there was a man who did it - Vittorio Mazzucconi, architect, painter and philosopher - in isolation and in silence, thus working to redeem from the failure of the twentieth century and to overcome it in a new vision.
With the different events planned within the programme the development of this vision will be followed, until its completion in "The Ark of Man", the building that Vittorio Mazzucconi proposed to build in front of the Duomo and the Twentieth century'sMuseum. It was called at the origin "'The Cathedral Ark" but its last and true name best expresses its vocation as a symbol of salvation and of birth of the new civilization that we hope, after the end of what we live, of which the twentieth century represents the tragic premise.

More than one building, is therefore a philosophy, the same that has inspired the whole of the work of the Master, of which we present here the different themes: