‘With the help of 25 very wide pictures, the exhibition narrates the life of Perceval, from childhood to the appointment as a Knight of the Round Table, from the discovery of the Holy Grail (the cup used by Christ during the Last Supper, in which legend has it that Joseph of Arimathea collected the last drops of the blood of the Lord) till the time when he abandoned all his weapons and died as a hermit. The exhibition is supported by a selection and reviews of materials which make up three of the four volumes of the “Illustrated History of the Grail “, which will be published by Jaca Book: colour drawings are by Franco Vignazia, texts by Voglino and Giuffrida. It is the story of an existential career, the narration of the itinerary of the knight who appears as the most outstanding figure of the whole Arthurian narrations. This Welsh character is rightly in the middle between Lancelot and Galahad. Lancelot is a very human type, but he is also victim of his own humanity, so much so that he does not fulfil his mission; Galahad, the character who actually reveals the secrets of the Grail, is on the other hand the man sent by God, the symbol of something that is beyond humanity. Perceval tells us that we can truly be men; the point is to walk all the way down the path of one’s own life, with eyes and heart pointing straight towards the ideal, towards something sacred and definitive which exists, which constitutes our destiny and manifests itself through encounters and historical events, within a companionship of men sharing the same ideal (the Knights of the Round Table). Although younger and less experienced than many others, and with the burden of his own guilt and contradictions, Perceval has been through the process of his initiation with the certainty that the search for the Grail was the task of his life. The literature about Perceval and the Grail is immense but not always consistent. The exhibition refers to the poem by Chrètien de Troyes, written around the year 1180, and revisited by three Frenchmen at the very beginning of the 13th century: the ‘pseudo Wauchier’, Manessier and Gerbert de Montreuil. Further references were drawn from “Didot-Perceval”, “Ber-lesvaux” and widely from the novels “Lancelot in prose”.’