Who has no childhood memory linked to the little dog Pimpa? Who hasn't had characters like the metalworker Cipputi, Ugo and Luisa, the man in the armchair and the half-naked woman, Trino and so many others crack a smile? Or even better, did they not make us think with greater awareness? From October 2019 to April 2020, MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts) is dedicating a major exhibition in Rome to Francesco Tullio Altan, born in 1942: ALTAN. Pimpa, Cipputi and other thinkers.

An immersive journey through illustrations and drawings in which doubt is revealed as the only possible great certainty, in which the great myths of history are overturned and humanity tries to float in the messy sea of life. The image of a little dog from our childhood holds us up, strong in her desire for knowledge, smiling in front of the wonders of the universe.

Altan's characters are all free thinkers, so free that they can even confess to themselves and the world their desire for self-destruction. Their thought is always a revelation: it is what we were about to say, what we had on the tip of our tongues but did not have the courage to express. Altan reveals this to us with surprising lucidity and precision in his words, as if he were always one step ahead of us.

The exhibition is hosted by the Extra MAXXI building, adjacent to the main museum designed by Zaha Hadid, and traces the illustrator's entire oeuvre through original drawings, posters, illustrations, paintings, sketches, boards, books and films through different chapters investigating the various stages. The linguistic intent of the exhibition tends to contrast a more cynical and pessimistic (sometimes nihilistic and defeatist) vision of society and the human being, always using the tools of irony and political satire, and then wanting to flow into a universe of colours, cheerfulness and lightness that leaves us with a smile and the memory of childhood.

So we start with 'Altan before Altan', the large drawing albums in which for years, before publishing, the artist practised looking for his own style, either through the characters or through the phrases, which at the time were less essential and less related to current events. His earlier paintings are, in fact, part of this unpublished collection.

The second chapter introduces the figure of Trino, the non-omnipotent creator of the world, a character born in the mid-1970s and published in the pages of Linus. A large wall, subdivided into several columns in a free reading order, tells the story of Italy through more than 200 cartoons from the 1970s to the present day. It is populated by Cipputi, Ugo and Luisa, the man in the armchair, the half-naked woman looking us in the eye and, of course, some of the main characters of Italian politics.

A central space is dedicated to his comic strip stories, his feuilletons featuring Ada, Colombo and Franz (a.k.a. St. Francis) among others: 90 original plates of Macao, a comic strip published in the pages of Corto Maltese magazine in 1984, are also on display here. The exhibition also gives space to Altan illustrator (for writings by Gogol, De Simone, Piumini, Rodari), and scriptwriter for the cinema. The exhibition ends with illustrations dedicated to the chameleon Kamillo Kromo and, above all, to the legendary little dog Pimpa, with original drawings, games for children and adults in a scenographic and interactive space that invites all visitors to physically enter the world of Altan's little dog.