L'arduo cimento | Palazzo Pepoli

From October 2 to 19, 2026, Palazzo Pepoli – Bologna History Museum hosts The Arduous Challenge – Living in the Mountains, Living in the Desert, an exhibition by Guido Moretti featuring one hundred works, including acrylic paintings and drawings, as well as three videos, each bringing together 200 drawings from the artist’s Travel Notebooks.

The exhibition unfolds across three settings:

• Trentino Alps
• Deserts of the Sahara and the Middle East
• Upper Mustang – The Last Tibet

Nature appears severe, dominated by a primal force that imposes silence and restraint on humankind. In extreme environments, from mountains to deserts, inhabiting a place is never a neutral act: it is a challenge, a continuous test of adaptation, balance and awareness. Here, the landscape does not welcome: it questions. It does not protect: it exposes. It demands presence, knowledge and responsibility. Forms of dwelling become essential, sometimes minimal, always conscious of a boundary that cannot be crossed without consequences.

Desertification is advancing, glaciers are retreating and the planet’s temperature continues to rise. Vast territories may witness populations moving towards more habitable regions. Against this backdrop, there are places that have always forced people to confront extreme conditions.

These are the lands of intense heat and extreme cold: the deserts and the mountains.

Though geographically distant and seemingly opposite, these places share centuries-old knowledge that has enabled their inhabitants not only to survive in highly hostile environments, but also to develop cultures and civilisations that can now offer valuable insights for facing an increasingly threatened future.

The exhibition’s central message emerges from this reflection. Accompanied by narration, the three videos explore the knowledge developed over centuries by the peoples of these regions, showing how communities living in extreme heat and cold have not only adapted to severe environmental and climatic conditions, but have also built cultures and civilisations that today can provide a valuable reference for a more responsible use of resources.

In an age of climate change, these landscapes reveal themselves not only as extreme environments, but also as a preview of what may lie ahead. They anticipate transformations that are only now beginning to emerge elsewhere: instability, scarcity of resources and rapid, profound changes in natural balances. In this sense, mountains and deserts are not marginal territories, but places at the forefront of change.

The Arduous Challenge tells the story of this tension.