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.<\/p>\n
Gibellina, Sicily<\/p>\n
Cretto di Burri<\/p>\n
Amid the hilly farmlands in Sicily\u2019s northern interior, the Cretto di Burri<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, Arnaldo Pomodoro,<\/a> Mimmo Paladino<\/a>, Pietro Consagra<\/a>, Mario Schifano<\/a> and Daniel Spoerri<\/a>.<\/p>\n Alberto Burri<\/a>, one of Italy\u2019s 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 \u2014 a concrete shroud to cover the earthquake\u2019s wreckage \u2014 mirroring his signature \u201cCretti\u201d works of cracked-paint on canvas<\/a>. In Gibellina, he poured cement to create a grid of irregular blocks as tall as a person. It is, he wrote, \u201ca permanent reminder of this event.\u201d Today, visitors, including homesick Gibellina villagers and the occasional flock of sheep, wander the haunting lanes that Mr. Burri created.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Yet Gibellina is now Italy\u2019s first capital of contemporary art<\/a>, with plans for new works, exhibitions and residencies for artists including Michelangelo Pistoletto<\/a>, Anish Kapoor<\/a> and others. \u201cWho but artists can guide us out of the ruins we\u2019re living in today?\u201d said Andrea Cusumano, the artistic director of this year\u2019s activities. There\u2019s hope that the occasion will also kick-start the restoration of the town\u2019s treasures<\/a>, and render it, as Mayor Corrao intended, a cultural destination.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, which was formed in 1979 and named for an Egyptian city. It has grown into a self-sufficient eco-village \u2014 population 600 \u2014 run with its own currency, government and fringe doctrine that includes magic, time travel and Atlantis.<\/p>\n The chambers the community dug, known as the Temples of Humankind<\/a>, are among the most curious modern wonders of Italy. On a spot believed by its founder to be a \u201criver of energy,\u201d 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\u2019s deities and legends \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Damanhur\u2019s experiment in group living has lasted longer than many communes. Whether the esoteric beliefs sound intriguing or outlandish, it\u2019s refreshing to visit a place so removed from today\u2019s rancorous world.<\/p>\n Tours from \u20ac65, or about $76.<\/p>\n Capalbio, Tuscany<\/p>\n The Tarot Garden<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, the monumental masterpiece by the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle<\/a> \u2014 an endeavor that took two decades to make. She enlisted fellow artists alongside townspeople who helped cover the sculptures\u2019 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\u2019s magnetism has only increased, accompanied by a growing appreciation for Saint Phalle\u2019s feminist and phantasmagorical creations.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 its every interior surface encrusted with mirrored mosaic shards \u2014 that is so colossal that Saint Phalle lived inside it for years, with her sleeping quarters in one of its gargantuan breasts.<\/p>\n This \u201cgarden of joy,\u201d as Saint Phalle called the sculpture park, portrays the 22 major arcana figures of a tarot deck, rendered in the artist\u2019s 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<\/a> in the Italian town of Bomarzo \u2014 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.<\/p>\n In a letter to a friend, Saint Phalle set out to show that a woman could create work on such an immense scale, too. \u201cMen\u2019s roles seem to give them a great deal more freedom,\u201d she wrote, \u201cand I was resolved that freedom would be mine.\u201d<\/p>\n Open from April 1 until Oct. 15, tickets \u20ac15.<\/p>\n Montegabbione, Umbria<\/p>\n La Scarzuola<\/p>\n A dream world built of improbable architecture, La Scarzuola<\/a> abounds with familiar symbols condensed into a cryptic tableau the size of a town square. Limestone-tuff monuments in miniature cluster together \u2014 the Parthenon, the Colosseum, the Temple of Vesta \u2014 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 \u2014 stars, suns, honeybees, human faces, a winged hourglass \u2014 hang in niches as metaphorical clues.<\/p>\n This inscrutable caprice was the creation of the architect Tomaso Buzzi<\/a>, who, in 1957, purchased La Scarzuola \u2014 a convent founded by St. Francis of Assisi in 1218. On its grounds, Buzzi decided to construct \u201cthe Ideal City, which I envisioned in my imagination,\u201d he wrote, \u201clike a theater backdrop.\u201d Mr. Buzzi, a onetime collaborator of the architect Gio Ponti<\/a> and the director of Venice\u2019s Venini<\/a> glassworks, was part of the architectural avant-garde, but leaned more toward ornament and scenography than his streamlined Modernist peers.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s architectural fantasia. The tours in English, led by an Australian writer and restorer who lives on-site, offer a clearer and more welcoming introduction.<\/p>\n La Scarzuola\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The bucolic landscape and cultural legacy of Italy have long inspired creativity, and with the grand ambitions of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9721,9727,75,9720,9728,5,9723,9722,7498,9724,9729,3905,9725,9726],"class_list":{"0":"post-13135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-italy","8":"tag-alberto","9":"tag-alps-mountains","10":"tag-art","11":"tag-burri","12":"tag-buzzi","13":"tag-italy","14":"tag-niki-de","15":"tag-saint-phalle","16":"tag-sculpture","17":"tag-sicily-italy","18":"tag-tomaso","19":"tag-travel-and-vacations","20":"tag-tuscany-italy","21":"tag-umbria-italy"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}