by InTrieste
The Museo LETS, the city’s museum dedicated to literature, will open a new exhibition on Monday evening featuring Storie Elisabettiane (“Elizabethan Stories”), a little-known but pioneering work by the Triestine artist Miela Reina. The show, presented in the museum’s Spazio Forum gallery, runs through Dec. 16, 2025, with free admission.
Reina, who died in 1972 at the age of 37, created the series between 1970 and 1971. Comprising 32 black-and-white panels, the work occupies a space between an artist’s book and what today might be called a proto–graphic novel. The drawings follow the romantic misadventures of two characters, Elisabetta and Piero, in a style rich with whimsical inventions and visual experimentation.
The exhibition includes the first panels of the series, two videos, and several additional works that highlight the artist’s narrative instincts. Reina’s commitment to storytelling runs throughout her career — from her early poetry and her 1964 illustrated Pinocchio for the ocean liner Raffaello to her graphic works of the 1970s, including La Piantagione and Blow up!.
Writing about her work, the scholar Gigetta Tamaro Semerani described Reina as “a master of the astonishing uninterrupted line,” praising her ability to bring together text, image and symbol in what she called an entirely new relationship of “interdependence and mutual liberation.”
Other pieces on display include the short comic Blow up (Ancora! Ancora!), Tavola pitagorica and Sommario, all of which reveal the humor and breadth of her visual language. The exhibition route also features two video works: Ottava dopo ottava, a reconstruction of a performative piece narrated by Reina herself, and Apparizioni, a photographic portrait of the artist by Mario Sillani Djerrahian.
Gillo Dorfles, the noted Italian critic, once described Reina as “the only artist from the Giulian area to have created, in the brief period between the 1960s and 1970s, a body of work worthy of being considered a solitary and inimitable adventure of the imagination.”
The exhibition is curated by the Centro Studi Miela Reina – APS in collaboration with the Municipality of Trieste. It opens with remarks by Massimo Premuda.
A related event, a lecture by Alessandro Di Grazia titled “Elizabethan Stories: Translation and Transfiguration,” will take place on Friday, Nov. 28, at 5:30 p.m.
Practical Information
Dates: Nov. 24 – Dec. 16, 2025
Opening: Monday, Nov. 24, at 6 p.m.
Venue: Spazio Forum, Museo LETS, Piazza Hortis 4, Trieste
Hours: Mon–Sat 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Sun 10 a.m.–1 p.m. (closed Tuesdays)
Admission: Free
