By Ginevra Barbetti – tutor Istituto Marangoni Firenze. Cover image Tema e Variazioni II, Fausto Melotti, 1981, stainless steel – an open-air artwork at Fattoria Celle.
How Fattoria di Celle Turns Nature Into Next-Level Art
Just outside Florence, there is a place where this question finds a living answer: the Fattoria di Celle, a remarkable open-air museum that embodies a new, poetic way of inhabiting the world. Here, among the rolling hills of Santomato di Pistoia, visual language and poetic expression are not superimposed onto the landscape, they emerge from it, in dialogue with its rhythms, silences, and transformations. It is a place where the boundaries between creative gesture and natural presence dissolve, forming a living, breathing example of what might be called cultural ecology. This vision was made possible by Giuliano Gori, a collector who became a catalyst for one of the most compelling experiments in environmental art in Europe.
Why Fattoria di Celle Is a One-of-a-Kind Open-Air Museum
Since the 1970s, the Fattoria di Celle has evolved into a unique open-air museum. It is home to more than eighty site-specific artworks, each conceived in harmony with the environment, not as an adornment to the landscape, but as a profound engagement with it. From the beginning, Gori envisioned a space where art would not dominate nature, but listen to it, a place where sculpture and poetry alike could be tools for seeing and inhabiting the world differently.
An Existential Connection Between Art, Nature and Poetry
In this context, the connection between nature, art, and poetry becomes not merely thematic, but existential. These are languages of attention, of care, each with the power to reactivate the relationship between human beings and the Earth. This is not about decoration or escapism, but about responsibility and recognition. A striking example is Sandro Veronesi’s poetic work, born from the destruction of an olive grove and transformed into a lyrical monument to healing. At Celle, such gestures are not exceptions; they are the norm. Each work is the result of listening, a process of coexistence with the terrain, the trees, the wind. Artists like Beverly Pepper and Alan Sonfist did not simply install their works, they nurtured them in collaboration with the place.
From Object to Ecosystem: How Art and Nature Grow Together
Giuliano Gori’s most enduring legacy, then, is not simply his collection, but his vision of what a collection could be. From his early engagement with artists and critics in the 1950s to his transformative journey through Spain in 1961, where he was inspired by artworks displayed in their original architectural contexts, he was always thinking beyond the conventional boundaries of art and its display. When he and his family moved to Celle in 1970, he saw the opportunity to enact a radical idea: a collection that would be site-specific, relational, and intergenerational. Artworks would no longer be detached from their environments but born from them.
Poetry Meets Nature: How Attention Sparks Care and Cultural Change
The result is a place that defies categorization: not a museum, not a park, not a monument, but a living ensemble where the rights of art, as Carlo Belli once wrote, begin where those of nature end. The phrase resonates deeply with Gori’s philosophy. Art, here, is an act of love, a language that knows how to pause, how to yield, how to listen. It is, as one observer noted, “an art that stops one step earlier,” allowing the form to emerge from the landscape itself, never imposed upon it.
This ethos extends to the poetic dimension of Celle. In recent years, the Celle Poetry Prize has reinforced the bond between visual art and poetic language, inviting poets and artists to create hybrid works that amplify the voice of nature. Poetry in this context is not ornamental; it is engaged, urgent, and deeply spiritual. It seeks not merely to describe the world but to shift the way we inhabit it. Because poetry is a form of attention. And attention is the beginning of care. In this moment of ecological and cultural crisis, poetic language offers us the chance to slow down, to listen, and to imagine other ways of being in the world. This imaginative capacity is the cornerstone of what might be called a cultural ecology: a vision that binds thought, beauty, and responsibility into a unified whole. At Celle, this is not an abstract concept, it is practiced daily.
Beauty is not a luxury, but a shared necessity, a form of care extended to the land, to language, to community. It is a regenerative force.
The Art of Balance: How Respect and Creativity Shape a New Cultural Vibe
And yet, this balance is delicate. The risk, always, is overstepping, when art seeks to impose itself rather than enter into dialogue. But when equilibrium is achieved, the results are transformative. The time needed to dwell poetically in a place is slow, patient, but it renews everything.
Among the many voices that have shaped and celebrated the Celle experience, one theme recurs: Giuliano Gori’s extraordinary generosity of spirit. He was a builder of ideas before he was a collector of works, a man who created community before he created a museum. That’s a sort of “joy of ideas” that infused Celle, capturing the sense of lightness and depth that continues to define the project. Gori’s legacy is not just the art he helped create, but the model of shared cultural responsibility he helped enact.
Today, as we face environmental and existential challenges of unprecedented scale, the example of Celle feels more vital than ever. It reminds us that art and poetry are not merely responses to crisis, but ways of life, ways of listening to the landscape, of dwelling in the world with respect, creativity, and care.
