Amidst the majestic towers and medieval palaces with historic charm, San Gimignano retains an entirely contemporary soul: in fact, in the streets and squares one can encounter public artworks created by great world-renowned artists who, over the years, have taken part in numerous projects promoted by the city and its associations. The first project to be realized was Affinity, promoted by the City Council and curated by Giuliano Briganti and Luisa Laureati in 1994, and involved works that would appear unexpectedly throughout San Gimignano. The aim was to create a more "active" experience for the city, strongly anchored in its centuries-old heritage.

In Affinity, art takes the form of contemporary "infiltrations" (R. Fuchs) into public spaces. Eschewing the monumental, the works-signed by five Italian artists-are intended to reinvigorate peripheral or decaying parts of the city, or to revitalize the cultural and aesthetic value of certain sites, legitimizing the value of art as a tool for renewal and redevelopment. Subsequently, the historic center of San Gimignano once again opened its doors to initiatives dedicated to contemporary art, hosting the project Art to Art., promoted by the Associazione Arte Continua, which permanently left works by Joseph Kosuth, Anish Kapoor, Luisa Rabbia and Kiki Smith.

In addition to these projects of national and international significance, the historic center of San Gimignano is home to numerous installations by artists from the city that fit throughout the center. These include works by Franco Balducci, Silvia Beghè and Maurizio Masini. The San Gimignano Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art houses a section devoted to these projects and can be an excellent starting point for embarking on the environmental art itinerary.

Stage 1

Compressed Equilibrium, Eliseo Mattiacci

The first work of the Contemporary Walk is encountered by looking up to the sky, under the Fortress of Montestaffoli: a beam placed horizontally on a tower of the fortress makes a show of itself, and prompts reflection on the meaning of the work. It was on the occasion of the project Affinity. Five Artists for San Gimignano., that the artist himself, Eliseo Mattiacci, left a clear, concise but comprehensive explanation of its creation and what prompted him to place it right there, in that spectacular position of precarious and unthinkable balance:

"My intervention was born of contrast: to the vertical sculptures, the towers, to the medieval severity, I wanted to contrast a lightness suggested by the old wall that seemed to be waiting to welcome this work of mine, a predestined place, escaping from the fortress toward the emptiness of the valley and accentuating the precarious sense of vertigo of this installation of mine."

(Quoted from Eliseo Mattiacci, Affinities. Five Artists for San Gimignano., exhibition curated by G. Briganti and L. Laureati, Florence, Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1995).

Stage 2

Sundial, Giulio Paolini

The walk continues to the Church of St. Augustine: on one of the sides of the church, Giulio Paolini, on the occasion of Affinity, designed and made a "sundial." But it is not just any sundial. It is a modern sundial intended to recall, in place and size, the ancient sundial that stood there years and years before, now lost. In the white-plastered dial, Paolini inserts an engraving depicting two concentric motifs: a hand intent on marking with the point of a pencil the center of a second hand's wristwatch, and an orbital tracing of circles and ellipses tangent to each other, which in turn originates from the circle of the previous clock.

Finally, at the tip of the drawn pencil Paolini inserts, slightly inclined, a real bronze pencil that marks the point of origin of the two drawings and that has, at the same time, the role of the gnomon of the new sundial. Crowning this very special astral design is the presence of the phrase "Tout se tient," which impeccably follows the entire concentric course of the design, beginning and ending with the same letter "T." The inscription also recalls the image of a sundial because it almost redundantly contains the letters marking the four cardinal points: "O"(West), "S"(South), "E"(East), "N"(North).

The French locution "Tout se tient," dating back to Ferdinand de Saussure (first appearing in a 1989 text), represents a large whole in which all parts are coherent and interrelated, just as the same motif of planetary orbits evokes the perfectly balanced and self-contained system of celestial iconography: an image of a harmony in itself well-defined and accomplished.

Stage 3

Untitled, Jannis Kounellis

Walking up to the Templar Church of San Jacopo al Tempio is an untitled work signed by Jannis Kounellis for the project Affinity. Explaining its meaning was the artist himself, who with clarity and affection speaks of it as follows:

"...The work is as tall as the church of San Jacopo, it resembles a bell tower, with the difference that it has the haunted bell that doesn't move and you can see that it doesn't move... I would like the iron with which it is drawn to be seen in the afternoon, because the silhouette at that hour is written between the back wall and the sky, and with its iron canopy it resembles the country crucifixions, made of iron, or the crosses at the ends of towers, or the gratings of abandoned houses. What matters to me is that it is not considered a sculpture, but a handwriting on the wall marked by time."

(Taken from Jannis Kounellis, Affinity. Five artists for San Gimignano, exhibition curated by G. Briganti and L. Laureati, Florence, Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1995)

Stage 4

Italy at Auction, Luciano Fabro

Once you arrive at the Town Hall, a splendid example of a medieval structure, you make the acquaintance of another work related to the project Affinity and created by Luciano Fabro. The sculpture, suspended in mid-air, is part of the series Italy, begun by the artist as early as 1968, in which the image of the Italic peninsula is repeatedly presented, but each time choosing different positions and materials (bronze, glass, fur, leather, gold, etc.), all ironically referring to the country's political and economic situation. In the work created for San Gimignano, the irony is graspable even in the very title given to it: Italy at Auction.

On the one hand, there is the clear message of a country at auction, selling itself to the highest bidder, and it is no coincidence that it was chosen for the town of San Gimignano, a unique jewel of history that has for years been the object of mass, hit-and-run tourism, which makes the town appear to be a commercial commodity; on the other hand, there is the literal construction of a country at auction, that is, the material reproduction of a country with a boot-like profile, skewered by a pole and put there, on display.

Stage 5

Untitled, Nuncio

Proceeding toward the ancient St. Matthew's Gate, one enters a narrow, atmospheric alleyway with a strangely luminous ceiling: this is where Nunzio's work, which on the occasion of Affinity told with a precise and detailed explanation of his work for San Gimignano:

"...The place I chose to carry out the San Gimignano project is located in one of the alleys transverse to the main road near the north gate. There exists in this small alley a small terrace that acts as a connection between two buildings. The intervention is made with a series (six) of gilded foils integrated into the spaces below the small barrel vaults. This determines a six-meter gilded vault interrupted by seven small arches. The ever-changing light and reflective qualities of the metal will take away the weight and darkness of the place. The intervention aims to find a relationship of continuity, including through the use of time-specific characters, such that the historical distance that separates the place from the contemporary world is nullified..."

(excerpted from: Nunzio, Affinities. Five artists for San Gimignano, exhibition curated by G. Briganti and L. Laureati, Florence, Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1994)

Stage 6

The chair in front of the door, Joseph Kosuth

In front of the Bagolaro, a monumental tree of San Gimignano, we stop for another stop on the Contemporary Walk, to which the words of Walter Benjamin serve as a backdrop: 

"Where one can stand, one can also sit. Not only children, but also women have their place on the doorstep, in close contact with the land, its traditions and perhaps its deities. The chair in front of the door is already a sign of urban innovation. Of the unheard-of faculty of sitting at the café, then, only men avail themselves."
(Images of Cities, W. Benjamin)

Joseph Kosuth's work for the city of San Gimignano, created for the Arte all'Arte project, is thus shown, the frame to a sitting, a 35-meter carving in pietra serena that through the words of Walter Benjamin accompanies and reminds of a bygone tradition: that of sitting in front of the front door. A tradition that is typically Italian and of the small villages, of those small towns, as San Gimignano has been. Through the use of one of the area's most common materials and the words of one of the most famous theorists of the early twentieth century, Kosuth thus succeeded in creating a dialogue between antiquity and contemporaneity, bringing to light a tradition that, perhaps, looking closely, has not yet completely faded from the memory and cultural roots of every San Gimignano resident. The first intervention saw Kosuth's work placed inside the Loggia del Podestà of San Gimignano, the symbolic place of city power for several centuries, but it was later moved to the garden of the Bagolaro, in front of a center that offers services and spaces for the elderly population. After all, what better location for the work than near those who embody the very image that Walter Benjamin sought to evoke in "Images of Cities"?

Stage 7

The Rest of Time, Luisa Rabbia

The itinerary continues, momentarily leaving the historic city center to reach the Monumental Medieval Sources. It is here that one encounters a colorful mosaic, created on the occasion of the project Art to Art, embedded in the historic structure: it is The Rest of Time. In this work, water is the element selected to create an intuitive and immediate connection to the theme of passing time. Mother and stepmother, matrix of life but also of death, this natural element was chosen by the artist to create his work, intervening directly within an ancient medieval fountain hidden from the main streets of the city, completely immersed in nature. The main subject of the sculpture, made of mosaic and ceramic, is the two-dimensional and illusory figure of an old man, Time, positioned among the waters, moss and humidity of the place. Wrapped in a heavy blanket, which appears almost useless because of the climatic conditions of the place, he shows the viewer his hands, one of his two feet and his face, made of ceramic to bring out the tears that, like the moments of an entire life, slowly slide down his face, the face of Time.

Luisa Rabbia often works on the theme of sleep, on a state of wakefulness that barely deviates from the unconscious and that at the same time is also the gateway to a dimension in which each of us continues to learn something about ourselves. Indeed, the final and overall image of the sculpture, calls to mind that of a modern Ophelia, surrounded by nature and accompanied by the waters of a river on a journey with an unknown destination, in a suspended atmosphere between past and present, life and death, dream and reality.

(the work is currently under restoration)

Stage 8

Underground, Anish Kapoor

The medieval tower of St. Augustine's, another stop on the Contemporary Walk, houses in its underground recesses a megalithic work, signed by the great artist Anish Kapoor on the occasion of Art to Art. The cramped space is entirely filled with a large stone mass, which is part of Kapoor's line of works that reflect on the concepts of space and mass, fullness and emptiness. The installation was the last work created for the project, and it closed the series of works intended to populate the sites of San Gimignano ... until the arrival of Kiki Smith.

Stage 9

Yellow Girl, Kiki Smith

The itinerary concludes by returning toward the starting point: at the Fortress of Montestaffoli, and in particular in the medieval Torrino, where it found its place Yellow Girl by Kiki Smith. The work is outside the scope of city projects dedicated to contemporary art, and was donated to San Gimignano following a similar project that took place in nearby Colle di Val d'Elsa. Yellow Girl was originally part of a project called "Pause," interpreted by 9 maidens in a seated position and made of white ceramic, with subtle pencil work to define the details. The maidens were meant to represent the moment of women waiting during traditional Japanese wood gathering. Finally, each maiden was apparently the same as the others, except for the color of the dress, which changed each time.

Kiki Smith brought three of these maidens to populate the arches of UMoCA, Cai Guo-Quiang's "museum" built under the arches of the San Francesco Bridge in Colle di Val d'Elsa. Blown crystal bulbs with incredibly subtle and refined reflections were added to the three maidens, dressed in red, yellow and blue; when the project was completed, the artist identified as many symbolic places in the area, including the Rocca di San Gimignano, to permanently house the works. Kiki Smith's maidens represent the concept of the idea, of the moment in which the famous spark is set off, which comes when least expected, in a second of momentary confrontation and dialogue with the space around us, as if in it the invisible link between us and the universe is made tangible and explicit.

"The young woman sits in nature, within nature and is not separated from it, so her ideas are the ideas of the world..."