A barren desert, a swarm of apparitions: the Italian writer Dino Buzzati’s novel, The Tartar Steppe (1940), is one of the few in Italian literature in which the idea of a hallucination, or fata morgana, becomes a narrative mechanism with allegorical power, peopled by characters worn down by endless waiting, in an infinite state of solitude. “The enigmatic patch of darkness seemed to be motionless,” he writes, “and little by little Drogo began to think again that there really was nothing there, only a black boulder like a nun, and that his eyes had been deceived—a touch of fatigue, that was all, a silly hallucination.” “Fatamorgana” is an exhibition in which, so to speak, the fantasy of the Tartar wilderness takes on substance. Basking in a vast phantasmagoria of withered dreams and dashed expectations, the presentation springs from a desire to decipher the boundaries of the desert of reality through which we move. The works chosen by the curator—Antonia Alampi, currently based in Cairo—act on all five senses, but at the same time, they subtly stimulate our sixth. The entrance of the gallery, wrapped in a spiderweb of brightly colored planks looks like a jumble of scaffolding in the grip of …