The town of Agliana, near Pistoia, is hosting its 10th edition of the Winter Exhibition of the Pork-Butcher’s Art Sunday 15th January. This event intends to present the best of local pork production as well as display the traditional, ancient trade of the ‘Norcineria’. Visitors will be able to taste various delicacies as from 10 am.
View of Agliana
Time to discover the least known parts of Tuscany and taste its traditional dishes. Link to holiday accommodation in Pistoia.
A trip to Pietrasanta is an artistic journey and an inner experience as well. Just strolling around becomes a visit to an open air museum which winds through the streets and squares. The many sculptures the visitor bumps into witness the close relationship between Pietrasanta and artists. That is the meaning of the International Park of Contemporary Sculpture which includes more than 40 works by international artists such as Cascella, Botero, Yasuda and Mitoraj .
Some, like Mitoraj, have chosen Pietrasanta as their hometown, while others, tied to the town by a strong feeling , often come here to organize exhibitions. Even characters belonging to the stars system are habitués in Pietrasanta. We are speaking of Gina Lollobrigida, actress turned into an artist who often exhibits here. You can easily meet artists in the streets or restaurants. The whole life of this small town turns around art. You can count plenty prestigious art galleries, marble laboratories and artistic foundries.
The Museo dei Bozzetti “Pietro Gherardi” which owns sketches of sculptures by artists who realized here their works is a real must. Pietrasanta is a permanent lab, art is in the air, it is something you breathe. Ex Marmi, a short walk from downtown, is a large ex marble lab, completely renovated for great international events, theatre, music, dancing and film workshops. The Garage Bonci Officina d’Arte organizes art courses to give everybody’s dreams a chance . Professors and students plan, at the end of each session, the Art Gallery, a free exhibition of the realized works.
The highly impressive Warrior by Botero, a gigantic bronze statue, placed in the central square, shields symbolically the town’s old treasures: the thirteenth-fourteenth century San Martino Cathedral , the Romanesque Sant’Agostino cathedral with its baroque belfry and cloister and the Church of San Giovanni e Santa Felicita. The modern and the old have successfully established an on-going dialogue.
The history of Pietrasanta deserves a respectful attention.
Founded in the thirteenth century along the Via Francigena, the medieval road walked by pilgrims on their way to Rome, it fell under the control of Pisa, Lucca, Florence and Genoa.
Sold in the fifteenth century to France it enjoyed in the 17th century a period of great economic development, thanks to the marble quarries, the iron industry and the drainage by Cosimo the first of the Medicis.
Let’s mention, at last, Marina di Pietrasanta and its Versiliana, a gorgeous park in front of the sea rich in literary memories. Its villa hosted various writers and enhanced its magical aura by the passionate love story between the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and the dancer Eleonora Duse.
Nowadays it is the right venue of summer events. In a natural amphitheater, surrounded by maritime pines, international ballet dancers and theatre companies offer locals and tourists their summer premiéres.
A romantic weekend is worthwhile in Versilia, a such astonishing backdrop where the glorious Apuan Alps gently embrace the Tyrrhenian Sea. You can profit from the nearby low-cost Pisa airport and the accommodations offered by Tuscany Holiday Rent to really enjoy the unjustly unknown charm of the sea in wintertime.
Le frittelle - the dough balls
From Saturday 14th January to Sunday 8th April San Donato in Collina, a hamlet of Rignano sull’Arno near Florence, is holding its famous Dough Balls Festival every weekend. Every Saturday from 2 to 7 pm and every Sunday from 9 am to 7 pm the appointment is at the dough ball stall.
San Donato in Collina
This festival is over 30 years old and is famous for both the quality and quantity of its dough balls, cooked with a rice filling following family recipes. As by tradition these sweets are served with a glass of excellent Tuscan Vin Santo, the traditional dessert wine of this region. On Sunday 19th March for St. Joseph the event will also be connected to the traditional trekking among the olive groves.
Vin Santo
An excellent opportunity to visit this part of Chianti Florentine. Link to holiday accommodation in Rignano Sull’Arno.
The Poggiali and Forconi Art Gallery have inaugurated Pete Wheeler’s first solo exhibition in Italy, continuing until Match 17th. With this new project the Art Gallery confirms its international vocation: after the Egyptian Youssef Nabil, the American Patti Smith and the young English artist Thomas Gillespie now the New Zealander Pete Wheeler.
Pete Wheeler's Berlin studio
After seeing and appreciating his series of works in Liste, Basilea, the Gallery has started its relationship with the New Zealand painter, who now lives and works in Berlin. It’s thanks to this that the idea of the exhibition in Florence came up. Wheeler has created expressly a new series of works that, although realized in different techniques, all have the same evocative atmosphere in common: 15 on canvas, figurative scenes that emerge from the conflict of light and black or in which the colour impact and it’s configuration in abstract parts evokes dreamy, surrealistic lands. There will also be a luminous installation exposed and, for the first time, some sculptures: works on ever-present symbols such as the shape of lightning and of the skull.
"Skin for Skin", oil on linen
In his paintings, Pete Wheeler initially used conflictual and aggressive images, often taken from political propaganda and mass media, expressing in this way his social awareness of the different political situations.
"Longer than Dirt", oil on linen
With the show at Poggiani and Forconi Art Gallery his reflection grows and is enriched with an ontological and universal aspect until now unexpressed. As a matter of fact when questioned by the curator Lorenzo Bruni: To whom does this title refer? What are the “Paths of the Destroyer?” Pete Wheeler answers: “It’s a small part of a greater whole, a pluralism that each one of us knows (laughs) or needs to know in person.”The artist addresses this new awareness along with the will to question the narrative rules that the subject has today: what to narrate and especially to whom. At the same time the artist deals with the function of painting in this “immaterial society” of globalized communication.
The Poggiani and Forconi Art Gallery
Another good reason for visiting Florence before Spring. Link to one of our holiday accommodations in Florence.
The Volti Svelati (Unveiled Faces): an excellent exhibition at the Uffizi , Florence from 15 December 2011 to 29 January 2012.
On show Roman sculptures dating from the late republican era (first century B.C.) up to the Tetrarchia ( late third century A.D.)
Forty-four marble busts, portraits of Roman emperors, intellectuals, athletes or just ordinary people have unbelievably challenged time, being able to communicate, through the centuries, their inner world up to now. They are the protagonists of the usual Christmas exhibition, free entrance, promoted by the Friends of the Uffizi at the Hall of the Royal Post Office.
The works highlight, according to the words of Antonio Natali, director of the Uffizi Gallery, a suggestive dialogue between ancient and modern art. The Roman statuary , which spans from the Republican era to the Imperial one, establishes interesting connections with the other works on show that are the 16th 17th and 18th century portraits and self-portraits, focusing on their details of archeological remains. The aim of the exhibition is to evaluate the Florentine marble classical collection, the greatest after the Roman Musei Capitolini. The Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti, other noble palaces and gardens own a large number of Roman artworks, hardly known in spite of their great value. They come from the collections of the Medicis and the Lorena who heaped here in Florence and in Villa Medici, Rome, a real treasure. The Uffizi, at the end of the16th century, got their basic qualification as the” Galleria delle Statue”, thanks to the gorgeous Medicean marbles, famous among the 16th century visitors more for the Medici Venus rather than for the Botticelli one.
The passion of the Medicis for Roman culture urged Lorenzo il Magnifico to buy the marble busts of Augustus and Agrippa, here on show, on his return from Rome in 1472. Similarly his son Giovanni, the future Pope Leone X, collected , following his father’s trend, in his Rome residence, Villa Medici, many valuable sculptures.
Art has always been for the Medicis and his successors the Lorenas an effective way of strengthening their political power. The exhibition focuses on the work of Abbot Luigi Lanzi, charged in 1780 by Pietro Leopoldo Lorena to increase the collection through the works both from the villas of the Grand Duchy and from privates as well. The treasure resulted then into 110 pieces from the original 70 pieces decorating the corridors of the second floor of Vasari’s building, thus proudly challenging the Roman and European collections. But times change. Hardly thankful to Luigi Lanzi’s loving work, at the end of 1990 the Uffizi corridors were newly arranged according to the new tastes, neglecting the Roman collection. Considered prejudicially copies of Greek originals, many marble works were condemned to storage rooms.
Now thanks to this exhibition, the Uffizi succeed in highlighting the unjustly forgotten works, a proud way of rediscovering their roots.
An opportunity to catch these last days. A non-touristy experience which allows to go beyond the surface. Go deep inside into the “secret” collections of the great families who shaped the history of Florence. Spend a short holiday in Tuscany profiting from one of the many accommodations in Florence offered by Tuscany Holiday Rent .
