On March 21st, in celebration of World Poetry Day, the Italian Institute of San Francisco inaugurates the exhibition "Voice Portraits: Evenings Will Return… The Voice of Italian Poetry", curated by Italian artist Giovanna Iorio, at its venue in historic Jackson Square, 710 Sansome Street. The exhibition is open to the public until May 31st.

The title is drawn from the eponymous poem by Alfonso Gatto, whose opening line, "Evenings will return to cool the piazzas in the blue" evokes both a sense of hope for the future and the revival of a cherished past. Through her multimedia exploration, artist Giovanna Iorio invites the audience to experience a cross-modal space composed of sight, hearing, and logos.

Born in Italy and based in London, Iorio views art as a bridge between sound, memory, and human connection. Her work delves into the emotional power of voices and she has collaborated with internationally renowned artists and musicians, seeking an interception between different artistic languages. Iorio is also the founder of the Poetry Sound Library, an interactive global map that preserves the voices of poets, both past and present, collecting audio recordings in which the authors themselves read their own work.

The project "Voice Portraits" transforms the voices of poets into visual spectrograms, allowing viewers to "hear with their eyes." Her work, which has been showcased globally, combines audio and images, accessible via QR codes linked to the Poetry Sound Library.

The Italian Cultural Institute San Francisco hosts “Voice Portraits: "Evenings Will Return… The Voice of Italian Poetry” for the first time in the United States, featuring seventeen panels dedicated to Italian poets such as  Patrizia Cavalli, Alfonso Gatto, Mariangela Gualtieri, Valerio Magrelli, Alda Merini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sandro Penna, Edoardo Sanguineti, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose bilingual poem, “Dove Sta Amore” was selected to further poetry’s exploration of words in their purest form, as the piece plays with the interaction between the sounds of the Italian and English languages.

During the opening ceremony translators Olivia E. Sears and Julia Nelsen will read a selection of English translations to accompany the originals’ audio recordings.