Dolce & Gabbana: Dal Cuore Alle Mani

Dolce & Gabbana's Labyrinth of Hands and Memory Where Craft Becomes Soul: An Ode to Italy’s Eternal Dance of Artisans and Dreamers.

By GIOVANNA G. BONOMO

June 2025

Palazzo Esposizioni, that neoclassical colossus of marble and memory, has always been a temple to the act of seeing. Designed by Pio Piacentini in 1883, its halls have witnessed revolutions of art, politics, and thought. Now, it cradles a different kind of insurrection: one stitched in silk, embroidered with gold, and drenched in the blood-orange hues of Sicilian sunsets. Dal Cuore Alle Mani: Dolce&Gabbana: From the Heart to the Hands—is less an exhibition than a ceremony, evoking the soul of Italian culture through the alchemy of thread and scissors. 

This pilgrimage of fabric and myth began in Milan’s Palazzo Reale, where Florence Müller first unfurled the duo’s odyssey into Italy's soul—a nation that has long been both muse and accomplice to Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. There, digital spectres flickered on the building’s façade, contemporary artists bending light to reinterpret the brand’s Alta Moda collections, as if the very stones of Milan had learned to dream.

Ten rooms pulsed with themes as layered as a Renaissance palimpsest: Venetian glass shimmered alongside Visconti’s Leopard, baroque devotion clashed with operatic excess, and live artisans, like penitent monks, stitched secrets into silk every Friday. It was a carnival of craft, a fever dream where tailors’ scissors became conductors’ batons.  But Rome, that eternal shapeshifter, demands more than repetition. Here, in the Palazzo Esposizioni, the exhibition sheds its Milanese skin and dons a new one, gilded by the city’s neoclassical bones.

The courtyard, that grand lung of the palace, breathes life into a domed constellation of dresses—each a handmade cosmos. At its apex, a gown emblazoned with the Colosseum spins slowly, like a planet tethered to Rome’s eternal axis. Below, garments whisper tales of Puglian grandmothers crocheting myths into lace, of Neapolitan nativity scenes transmuted into capes, of a blue dress painted with roses for a Spencer daughter, its petals still trembling with the weight of dynasties. Here, the hands of artisans are saints; their labor, a liturgy.

Milan’s ghost lingers, of course. In “La Devozione,” black gowns drip with golden hearts, pierced like martyrs—a motif first consecrated in Lombardy’s baroque chapels. “Il Gattopardo” resurrects Angelica’s bridal gown, its train a shroud of Sicilian dust, echoing the immersive ballroom that once waltzed in Palazzo Reale. Yet Rome twists the needle. “Anatomia Sartoriale” dissects what Milan merely dressed: mannequins splayed like cadavers reveal corsets and guêpières, their boned ribs echoing the palazzo’s own neoclassical skeleton.

New rooms emerge, hungry for their own myths. “Cinema” flickers with Giuseppe Tornatore’s Devotion, Morricone’s score weeping over Sicilian vistas. The screen bleeds into reality; one expects Monica Bellucci to materialize, trailing cigarette smoke and tragedy. Then, Sardinia—an island of ancient murmurs—rises in a cavernous alcove. Leather is tooled with pagan symbols; wool clings to forms like moss to stone.  The exhibition digs deeper, unearthing an Italia older than baroque or Renaissance, raw and snarling.

Dolce, ever the penitent, confessed his trepidation: Rome, that “eternal beauty,” demanded reverence. Yet the duo’s audacity thrives here. In “Vestire l’Architettura,” Baroque volutes coil around dresses; Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist smirks from a jacket lining, his finger raised not toward heaven, but toward the catwalk—a sly nod to Milan’s video-mapped Renaissance dialogues. Even Piacentini’s architecture bends to their will—the neoclassical rigor softened by a skirt’s drape, a sleeve’s rebellion.

Not opulence but overwhelming intimacy. In “La Sartoria,” a recreated tailor’s workshop sits frozen in time: scissors rusting, threads snarled, a bust draped with muslin.

It is a shrine to Domenico’s father, a humble sarto, whose ghosts stitch the seams of this empire. Here, the exhibition’s title crystallizes: HANDMADE. Every bead, every pleat, is a word in a poem to artisans, to ancestors, to a country that is both cradle and straitjacket.  As the final room fades, one feels the weight of hands—those that carved marble, those that kneaded bread, those that clutch rosaries or sketch dresses. Dolce&Gabbana’s creations are not garments but reliquaries, holding the bones of a culture that worships beauty as both sacrament and sin. Palazzo Esposizioni, that keeper of visions, has never felt more alive, and leaving us more haunted.