Antonio Monda's novel A Glorious Morning, set on Pier 59 in New York in April 1912 while waiting for the Titanic, becomes a visual development exhibition signed by Studio Luca Musk Art. At the Centro Studi Americani in Rome, for the 2026 Festival of American Culture and the 250th anniversary of the United States, twenty tables and twelve totems including concept art, character design and storyboard, plus a teaser, in a project that also uses AI. On November 12, the writer will speak via video link from New York
“And as the elegant ship grew / in stature, grace and color, / in the shadowy, silent distance the iceberg also grew.” Thomas Hardy composed The Convergence of the Twain in 1912, after a shipwreck had just taken place, and imagined the ocean liner and the mountain of ice as two betrothed spouses destined for an appointment fixed by fate. Antonio Monda, however, never mentions that ship in his novel. It tells of the wait, which is perhaps the cruelest and most cinematic form of hope. So A Glorious Morning (Mondadori) is a book built on an absence, on the emptiness on the horizon that a heterogeneous crowd scans from Pier 59 in New York, in April 1912, waiting for the largest steamship ever launched. And now that absence takes shape, color, face.
A glorious morning becomes an exhibition: dates and venue
The novel is transformed into A Glorious Morning – Visual Development Project, an exhibition itinerary conceived and created by Studio Luca Musk Art, i.e. the visual artist and set designer Luca Muscio (aka Luca Musk) and Stefania Proietti. The venue is the Center for American Studies in Rome, at Palazzo Mattei di Giove, in via Michelangelo Caetani 32. The presentation is scheduled for Thursday 12 November 2026, during the inaugural ceremony of the 2026 Festival of American Culture, dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States: Monda, author of the original preface to the exhibition, will speak via video link from his studio in New York (access to the evening is reserved for guests with an invitation). From 16 to 20 November the exhibition can be visited during the times of the Festival initiatives, scheduled at the Center from 12 to 20 November: before going, it is best to consult the calendar on the Center for American Studies website. The exhibition enjoys the patronage of the University of Foggia and uses the Cinecittà logo, granted for the occasion.
In-depth analysis
Michele Soavi and Luca Musk, when the frame becomes dreamlike
What is visual development: from page to frame
How do you give a face to someone who existed only in the head of a writer and his readers? The question is as old as cinema. When David O. Selznick entrusted the entire visual aspect of Gone with the Wind (1939) to William Cameron Menzies, Hollywood coined a new title for him, that of production designer. The special Oscar he received, however, rewarded the use of color to increase the dramatic intensity of the film. Akira Kurosawa, in the years when no one wanted to finance Kagemusha – Shadow of the Warrior (1980), painted color plates for years to see the film before being able to shoot it: the dream, even before the set.
Twenty tables and twelve original totems here reconstruct Monda's narrative universe through the study of characters, iconographic research, concept art, character design, settings, storyboards and audiovisual experimentation. Preparatory studies and definitive tables document the transition from reading to the definition of a visual language. Ultimately it is the work that precedes each take, the one that the spectator never sees and which nevertheless decides everything he will see.
New York in 1912 between Titanic, immigrants and Mayor Gaynor
The metropolis described by Monda is crossed by expectations and contradictions: immigration, social mobility, class differences, racial discrimination, urban transformations, an almost religious trust in progress. The Titanic, expected at Pier 59, becomes the symbol of an era, the promise of a future without limits and at the same time the fragility of human ambitions. On the platform the invented figures mix with the historical ones. From the faces of Yehuda Rosenthal and Monique De Smet we arrive at the mayor William Jay Gaynor and the conductor Josef Stránský (the Bohemian who in 1911 had taken up Gustav Mahler's legacy at the helm of the New York Philharmonic, before reinventing himself as an art dealer). The images do not limit themselves to portraying the protagonists: they explore their psychology, their conflicts, their relationship with the spaces of the city.
Cinema has already taken root in those parts. Nuovomondo by Emanuele Crialese (2006) comes to mind, with Sicilian farmers dreaming of rivers of milk and landing on Ellis Island. Or the twentieth century of The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean by Giuseppe Tornatore (1998), born on a steamship and unable to go ashore, since the city, seen from the bridge, is a piano with too many keys. Likewise, Monda's New York is an endless keyboard, where everyone plays their own note waiting for the music to arrive.
Antonio Monda: «Giving body and soul» to the characters
The dialogue between the writer (a professor at New York University and former artistic director of the Rome Film Festival) and the Studio developed through meetings and insights into the relationship between literary narrative and image construction. The preface signed by Monda is titled Body and Soul, like Robert Rossen's film with John Garfield, Body and Soul (1947). «The most important result of the work of Luca Muscio and Stefania Proietti consists in having managed to give body and soul, body and soul, they would say in America, to those who until now lived only in the written page and in my imagination and that of the readers», writes the author.
1912 and 2026: storyboards, teasers and artificial intelligence
The project also includes an original audiovisual teaser, designed to explore the cinematic dimension of the novel. The teaser and the first tables were shown at Monda in the Studio's Rome headquarters, on the occasion of the video interview granted by the writer to Stefania Proietti, editor of the online column Orizzonti Culturali. The research also uses artificial intelligence tools, integrated into a process guided by historical research, drawing, image selection and artistic choices.
The result is a dialogue between two eras of technological transformation: 1912, full of optimism towards modernity, and 2026, in which new technologies are redefining the way of producing images. The topic divides, indeed. And the exhibition ends up asking a question that goes beyond its tables: whether the machine can remain at the service of the hand, and not vice versa. On the other hand, the Titanic was also a technical marvel: the problem, then as today, is who is at the helm.
