YUKAI: MOSTRI E SPIRITI GIAPPONESI A FIRENZE

When: from June 13 / 2024 to November 03 / 2024

Where:  Museo degli Innocenti Firenze

Vertigo Syndrome finally brings Yōkai to Florence. Monsters, Spirits and other Anxieties in Japanese Prints returns to offer the Italian public the fantastic world of monsters from Japanese tradition, through more than one hundred and fifty works from the 18th and 19th centuries, including unpublished ancient prints, rare books, masks, and weapons and armor on loan from the Stibbert Museum in Florence.

ONE HUNDRED CANDLES AND FRIGHT WRAPS YOU OVER

An ancient ritual to find courage. The exhibition opens with an immersive room that lets the visitor relive the experience of the most legendary test of courage of the samurai: the ritual of the 100 candles. A ritual that began after sunset and saw the samurai gather in a room lit by the light of one hundred candles. Each of them had to tell their companions a story populated by yōkai, the Japanese monsters, with the aim of testing their courage by scaring them to death. At the end of the story, the person who had told it had to get up, blow out the candle in a lantern, take a mirror and look at themselves in the corner farthest from the others: the progressive darkening of the room accompanied the narration of increasingly frightening and suspenseful tales. In the same way, visitors will enter a completely dark room, lit only by the dim light of a hundred candles that, with a play of mirrors, will seem to multiply and will project red, flickering shadows onto their faces. The candles will then go out one by one, accompanied by the hoarse voice of the ghost of an old samurai, who died after going mad after meeting a real monstrous yōkai in the night.