The 2025 edition of the Antichissima Fiera delle Grazie will take place from August 14th to 17th in Grazie di Curtatone, Mantua province, marking the festival’s 600th anniversary. For six centuries, every mid-August feast day, this small village within the Mincio Park transforms into a hub of spirituality, folk art, and devotion.
Central to this historic event – one of Italy’s longest-running – is the national gathering of Madonnari (street painters), which has established Grazie as the capital of this art form and an international symbol of ephemeral art.
This anniversary edition, coinciding with the Jubilee year, features prominent figures from art and culture, including Kurt Wenner, pioneer of perspective street art, and historian Giordano Bruno Guerri, president of the 2025 competition jury.
Organizers state the 51st national Madonnari meeting will bring 130 artists worldwide to Grazie, turning the Sanctuary square into a spectacular open-air gallery. The 2025 theme, “Per Grazia Ricevuta. Le Madonne del Mondo a Grazie” (For Grace Received. The Madonnas of the World in Grazie), promises a visual journey across continents – from Marian sanctuaries in the Americas to Our Lady of Nagasaki, Lourdes to Medjugorje, and Pompeii – culminating in Mantua’s own Marian devotion. Michela Bogoni, the 2024 “Paradiso” category winner, created the official anniversary image depicting three ethnically diverse Marian faces overlooking the Sanctuary, with a crocodile (a traditional emblem of evil) reframed as a symbol of shared, multicultural, universal hope.
Significant anticipation surrounds “Ianua Coeli” (Gateway to Heaven), a special non-competition project commissioned by Curtatone for the Jubilee anniversary. Art historians Paola Artoni and Paolo Bertelli designed this collective work, developed with renowned US street painter Kurt Wenner – considered the father of 3D or anamorphic pavement art, who revolutionized urban art with high-impact visual illusions. A team of master chalk artists, all past Grazie first-prize winners, will execute the Ianua Coeli sketch under Wenner’s artistic direction, creating a monumental, immersive piece inspired by the Marian figure as the “Gateway to Heaven.”
The finished, physically traversable artwork will become a symbolic Jubilee Holy Door, incorporating references to the Gonzaga family, the Sanctuary, the city of Mantua, and Marian pilgrimage. Wenner, American but long resident in Italy, began his career at NASA before moving to Rome in the early 1980s to dedicate himself to street art.
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