The city with its 80 and pass contemporary works of art exhibited in streets and squares has a history that dates back to the nineteenth century. Behind the sculptures that build the Pietrasanta open-air art park (starting with those of Fernando Botero, Igor Mitoraj, Kan Yasuda, and soon Girolamo Ciulla, with a beautiful fountain: among the few among others site specific, because here too the culture of the “roundabout plus sculpture” prevails with the renunciation of art to build a social connection with the community, ending up being swallowed up in the logic of the glance and away) there is a district that has reinvent itself by facing historical crises. To acquire an international leadership that gives substance to the city.
The large workshops in which ancient art was reproduced for churches and palaces all over the world, have regenerated themselves and have produced many ribs where the skill of the hands – today flanked by a technology that requires knowledge to integrate it into production processes and storytelling at the service of contemporary art. In the marble and bronze workshops (and mosaics, inlays), international artists dominate and, alongside the artisans, shape their works.
A change of course that comes from the mid-seventies and that found public unveiling in 1978 with the first exhibition in the historic Piazza del Duomo, an exhibition of the many artists who had come to animate these shops in the center.
A lot has happened since then. The workshops have moved outside, to the artisanal areas. The city center has become quite a place to see and eat rather than live, with trade and tourism that have progressively defined its identity. With many art galleries and exhibitions to represent the imaginary of the city of art, but with the foundations of all this hardly visible. Instead, the entrepreneurs are aware of it, the art district needs to be shown and promoted, in its history and in its modernity.
In the last three years, however, the associations of the shops – united in ArtigianArt – have planted themselves, also struggling to find institutional banks. The idea of a craft museum has not made progress (now 5 million will arrive from the PNRR on a project that entrepreneurs are waiting to know), while in territorial marketing the district is a spot presence.