The main theme of the Imaginary Periplus exhibition is the journey, either real or fictional. This is the first anthological exhibition on Hugo Pratt since his death 10 years ago, in 1995.
This exhibition in Siena proposes to travel through the places of Pratt’s life and imagination. The journey starts in Venice, where the author was born, and wanders through the many regions of the world the author lived in or visited. All his journeys were faithfully reproduced in the settings of his great amount of works, including comics, watercolours, or China ink, and filtered through his memories of Stevenson, Conrad and London coming from his childhood readings.

These reminiscences, which induced Pratt during his childhood to dream about the South Seas, are the source from which he derived his inspiration for Ballad of the Salt Sea, his first great comics story where Corto Maltese, undoubtedly his most famous character, appeared for the first time. The story is composed of 163 plates, all of which are displayed in a special section of this exhibition.
The reading of the works by Curwood, Zane Grey and Kennett Roberts aroused Pratt’s love for the world of American Indians and for the border-line context that he had the opportunity to study and to know so deeply that he could write and draw the unforgettable plates of Wheeling and Ticonderoga.

Pratt set the action of The Scorpions of the Desert in Africa. There he would find the static and silent vastness of deserts as well as the colours of the coats of arms and uniforms that he had seen and admired as a child in the period he lived with his father in Addis Ababa. On the other end, classic adventure stories typical of the Anglo-Saxon literature would lead him to range over the worlds of Anna nella jungla (Ann in the Jungle), Sgt. Kirk, Cato Zulu and Jesuit Joe.