Sonia Marrese transforms the area in front of the restrooms in Piazza dei Miracoli into a contemplative threshold. Six photographs from the installation “Double Dream” inhabit the invisible margins of one of the most famous squares in the world.
The Opera della Primaziale Pisana presents a new site-specific intervention by Sonia Marrese in Piazza del Duomo. Six large-format black-and-white photographs now occupy the entrance to the square’s restrooms, transforming a functional space into a contemplative threshold. Even the most prosaic places can become a stage for enchantment. Indeed, perhaps it is precisely there that beauty reveals its most radical nature: that of a gentle invasion that spares nothing - not even the spaces we would prefer to render invisible out of modesty.
It is within this seemingly paradoxical logic that the intervention takes shape: bringing art precisely where no one would expect to find it, transforming a kind of functional exclave into a space nonetheless inhabited by beauty.
The images part of the series “Double Dream / Dream within a Dream” do more than decorate a service gate: they dematerialize it. Printed on reflective material, the photographs interact with light at different hours of the day, creating an effect of veiled transparency, a see-through/non-see-through quality that invites those waiting outdoors to look back, to reflect - literally - on what they have just passed through. Indeed, all of Marrese’s photographs portray Piazza dei Miracoli: the Pisa Cathedral, the Pisa Baptistery, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and even its belfry cell.
Function becomes pleonastic. For in a square where every centimeter is saturated with monumental beauty, even the recess devoted to the most elementary human need is permeated by the same aesthetic density that governs the Tower, the Baptistery, the Cathedral. As if Pisa could not do without itself, not even along its margins.
“The reflections on water that characterize my photographic work,” explains Sonia Marrese, “here become reflections of memory. Those who find themselves in this waiting space can see, almost against the light, the magnificence of the square they have just left behind. It is an invitation not to forget where you are, even when you are at the margins.” The strongly contrasted black and white of the photographs amplifies this sense of estrangement. Taken beginning in the spring of 2020, Marrese’s images reveal a sparse human presence that expands the surreal beauty of the sumptuous settings, doubled in the water. As noted by photographer and essayist Tano Siracusa in his critical reading of Double Dream, “water and sky, above and below, high and low repeat and overturn the geometries of the monuments, of human artifice, and the abstract forms of the clouds, almost suggesting a circularity of vision beyond the convention of the square and the rectangle […]. In the symmetries of the reflections, the deep blacks of the shadows and the piercing light that cuts through them double the artifice and suggest, beyond the drama and unrest of the present, a rarefied space of pure imagination and wonder.”
From Construction Site to Service Area: A Poetics of Interstices
Marrese’s project follows in continuity with MORGANA. Reflections of Light and History (2025), the installation with which she transformed construction scaffolding - also in Piazza dei Miracoli - into a poetic mirror of the city. If then the construction site became a “narrative opportunity,” today it is the service area that changes its status: from a space of necessity to a contemplative threshold. Marrese responds with minimal yet unexpected gestures: she infiltrates beauty into the interstices, into the places no one would think to observe with care.
The Artist
Sonia Marrese is a freelance photographer who lives and works in Pisa. She grew up in the atmosphere of a mobile laboratory - a truck converted into a darkroom and used by her father, an advertising photographer in the 1970s. From that experience was born a deep love for the study of the image and its capacity to tell stories. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and has also published photographic works: “I observe what I see, I enter into what captures my gaze and my emotions, and through the shot I hold that moment still, seeking to return a poetic, magical, dreamlike image.”
The installation
Promoted by: Opera della Primaziale Pisana - https://www.opapisa.it/
Title: Double Dream / Dream within a Dream
Artist: Sonia Marrese
Location: Piazza del Duomo (Piazza dei Miracoli), Pisa - area in front of the restrooms
Period: February 2026 - June 2026
Admission: Free during monument opening hours
