Mario Dondero's Unseen Works on Display at Forte di Bard

The Forte di Bard in Valle d'Aosta, Italy, is hosting an exhibition of previously unseen photographs by Italian photographer Mario Dondero (1928–2015), curated by Claudio Composti, from July 24 to October 18, 2026. Titled "Mario Dondero. Inediti. L'archivio di un partigiano dell'umano," the show draws from the Archivio Dondero in Fermo, managed by the Fototeca provinciale di Fermo. Dondero, a former partisan who fought in the Val d'Ossola during World War II, documented conflicts and social movements worldwide, including the Algeria-Morocco war (1963), Palestinian camps in Lebanon, the Greek-Turkish conflict in Cyprus, wars in Guinea-Bissau and Guinea Conakry (1970), and the Cambodian border (1980). His archive holds hundreds of thousands of slides and notebooks. The exhibition features portraits of intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (1963), Pier Paolo Pasolini with his mother Susanna Colussi, and members of the Nouveau Roman at Éditions de Minuit (1959), as well as images of the 1968 Paris protests, African liberation movements, post-Soviet Russia, rural life, Francoist Spain, and Greece under the Colonels. Dondero's work reflects his commitment to social and political storytelling, as he expressed in a 2011 interview with Simona Guerra, criticizing media consolidation and emphasizing the importance of authentic journalism. The exhibition is presented in the Cantine halls of the Forte di Bard.