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Koelliker’s Wunder-Palazzo
To See the World upon a Shelf
TO SEE THE WORLD UPON A SHELF
Gabriele ReinaThough they never met, Ricci would have had plenty to talk about with one of this century’s most inventive and multidimensional filmmakers, Guillermo del Toro. It’s no accident that del Toro’s 2022 miniseries was named Cabinet of Curiosities. He might just as well have called it Wunderkammer: it is a Cornell box of the marvelous, the monstrous, the exotic, the uncanny, and the rare. That could be a short description of Ricci’s own operating script when it came to both collecting and publishing. Another kindred spirit would have been Luigi Koelliker. Gabriele Reina invites us to accompany him on a tour of his remarkable collection and private house-museum: a Wunderkammer of our own time, a melding of age-old hallucinations and the most modern and shrewd Swiss/Milanese efficiency.
