The bucolic landscape and cultural legacy of Italy have long inspired creativity, and with the grand ambitions of the 20th century, a handful of artists took that inspiration to monumental proportions. They fashioned metaphysical fairy-tale lands in the woods; buried an entire town in concrete; and even hollowed out a mountain. A visit to these creative worlds opens the door to the fantastical, and offers what many travelers crave most: a chance to be inspired, or at least awe-struck.
Gibellina, Sicily
Cretto di Burri
Amid the hilly farmlands in Sicily’s northern interior, the Cretto di Burri appears suddenly: a blocky expanse of pale concrete etched with a labyrinth of pathways. It is one of the largest works of land art in the world.
Blanketed under the concrete is the rubble of the houses of Gibellina, a poor farming town that was leveled by an earthquake in 1968. Its residents were eventually resettled 12 miles away in a new town named Gibellina Nuova. Ludovico Corrao, the visionary mayor of the old Gibellina, invited artists and architects to dream up this virgin post-earthquake town as an open-air museum, and to imagine its piazza, its church, its theater and its public art as groundbreaking contemporary artworks. Top talents from all over Italy contributed creations, including Carla Accardi, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Mimmo Paladino, Pietro Consagra, Mario Schifano and Daniel Spoerri.
Alberto Burri, one of Italy’s best-known artists of the 20th century, was the lone contributor who decided to work not in the new town but amid the debris of old Gibellina. He devised a 21-acre sculpture — a concrete shroud to cover the earthquake’s wreckage — mirroring his signature “Cretti” works of cracked-paint on canvas. In Gibellina, he poured cement to create a grid of irregular blocks as tall as a person. It is, he wrote, “a permanent reminder of this event.” Today, visitors, including homesick Gibellina villagers and the occasional flock of sheep, wander the haunting lanes that Mr. Burri created.
Critics have contended that the overarching Gibellina Nuova project, which was never fully completed, treated the displaced villagers as an afterthought, providing little shade, public space or agricultural land. Accusations of misappropriated and siphoned-off funds compounded frustrations over unfinished works. Many artworks requiring upkeep, like the Cretto di Burri, have been neglected.
Yet Gibellina is now Italy’s first capital of contemporary art, with plans for new works, exhibitions and residencies for artists including Michelangelo Pistoletto, Anish Kapoor and others. “Who but artists can guide us out of the ruins we’re living in today?” said Andrea Cusumano, the artistic director of this year’s activities. There’s hope that the occasion will also kick-start the restoration of the town’s treasures, and render it, as Mayor Corrao intended, a cultural destination.
Beneath the foothills of the Alps are what may be some of the biggest underground temples in the world. They were carved out in secret by a ragtag spiritual community called Damanhur, which was formed in 1979 and named for an Egyptian city. It has grown into a self-sufficient eco-village — population 600 — run with its own currency, government and fringe doctrine that includes magic, time travel and Atlantis.
The chambers the community dug, known as the Temples of Humankind, are among the most curious modern wonders of Italy. On a spot believed by its founder to be a “river of energy,” the equivalent of three Manhattan blocks worth of rock was manually bored out to make room for some 20 stories of cave cathedrals. The group covered the walls with Byzantine-style mosaics, stained glass and murals of Damanhurians frolicking in Eden, wearing togas like the ancient Romans, or in all their nude majesty. Paintings depict the world’s deities and legends — Hercules, the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, Aladdin, the Hindu goddess Kali and countless others. There are eight temples in all, including a soaring pyramid that is paneled top to bottom with mirrors.
Damanhur’s experiment in group living has lasted longer than many communes. Whether the esoteric beliefs sound intriguing or outlandish, it’s refreshing to visit a place so removed from today’s rancorous world.
Tours from €65, or about $76.
Capalbio, Tuscany
The Tarot Garden
In the Maremma region, monsters and mythical creatures rise several stories high from the olive groves, all clad in a delirious rainbow of mosaics. This is the Tarot Garden, the monumental masterpiece by the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle — an endeavor that took two decades to make. She enlisted fellow artists alongside townspeople who helped cover the sculptures’ frames in mosaic tiles. The artist opened her park to the public in 1998, and then passed away a few years later, in 2002. Yet the Tarot Garden’s magnetism has only increased, accompanied by a growing appreciation for Saint Phalle’s feminist and phantasmagorical creations.
The 14-acre park, built atop Etruscan ruins, teems with behemoths that include an angel of death on horseback, a hermaphrodite devil with three golden penises, a many-headed snake and a sunbird crowned with golden beams. There is also a sphinx — its every interior surface encrusted with mirrored mosaic shards — that is so colossal that Saint Phalle lived inside it for years, with her sleeping quarters in one of its gargantuan breasts.
This “garden of joy,” as Saint Phalle called the sculpture park, portrays the 22 major arcana figures of a tarot deck, rendered in the artist’s loopy, jubilant figures. The idea came to her in a dream when she was locked in an asylum as a young woman, and it solidified with a visit to the Sacro Bosco in the Italian town of Bomarzo — a sculpture park dating to 1552 that was built by the soldier and aristocratic soldier and poet Pier Francesco Orsini, whose pagan marvels populate the woods an hour inland from the Tarot Garden.
In a letter to a friend, Saint Phalle set out to show that a woman could create work on such an immense scale, too. “Men’s roles seem to give them a great deal more freedom,” she wrote, “and I was resolved that freedom would be mine.”
Open from April 1 until Oct. 15, tickets €15.
Montegabbione, Umbria
La Scarzuola
A dream world built of improbable architecture, La Scarzuola abounds with familiar symbols condensed into a cryptic tableau the size of a town square. Limestone-tuff monuments in miniature cluster together — the Parthenon, the Colosseum, the Temple of Vesta — with a spiraling representation of the Tower of Babel and innumerable staircases to nowhere that are like an M. C. Escher print made real. A grassy amphitheater holds a labyrinth-patterned stage, a watchful jumbo eye and a fire-breathing ogre head. Golden motifs — stars, suns, honeybees, human faces, a winged hourglass — hang in niches as metaphorical clues.
This inscrutable caprice was the creation of the architect Tomaso Buzzi, who, in 1957, purchased La Scarzuola — a convent founded by St. Francis of Assisi in 1218. On its grounds, Buzzi decided to construct “the Ideal City, which I envisioned in my imagination,” he wrote, “like a theater backdrop.” Mr. Buzzi, a onetime collaborator of the architect Gio Ponti and the director of Venice’s Venini glassworks, was part of the architectural avant-garde, but leaned more toward ornament and scenography than his streamlined Modernist peers.
La Scarzuola was his private otherworld hidden in the Umbrian woods. The work, which was conceived as a giant ship with a naked female leviathan at the prow, includes esoteric symbols drawn from alchemy, cosmology, kabbalah, Freemasonry and Hermeticism.
When Mr. Buzzi died in 1981, his nephew, Marco Solari, moved into the convent, restoring La Scarzuola and its overgrown grounds, and it became a protected site and opened to the public. Today Mr. Solari leads the Italian-language tours but, famously irascible, he often obfuscates rather than explains his uncle’s architectural fantasia. The tours in English, led by an Australian writer and restorer who lives on-site, offer a clearer and more welcoming introduction.
La Scarzuola’s most important enigma, though, is the impulse it shares with other epic works like the Cretto di Burri, Damanhur and the Tarot Garden: how humans give form to their imaginings, and what we can understand about life by experiencing the creations of others.