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And outside a sea all fresh with color (Sandro Penna)

Let us not be fooled, the beauty of places is not free, not even in this narrow and squashed land, in the face of a sea disputed between Tuscany and Liguria.

For we are not dealing with a last remnant of paradise, but with a space wrested from nature, slowly and with effort.

A thin plain pushed, but almost never attracted, toward the sea by the looming of sullen mountains, which truncate the view, take away space, and grant men and animals only impervious paths; up steep and craggy sides, where every palm of flat land has cost centuries of toil, sleepless nights, and daily worries.

A land wrested, in the course of eternal hand-to-hand struggle, from the hostility of the waters, the tumultuous ones that break through the banks, dig up the earth and drag it downstream, and the stagnant ones, which swamped the plain, making it inhospitable, infected and malarial.

This is how man here had to get used to living between the land and the sea, facing an unchanging horizon line, fearing neither rain nor dust, clinging to ancient confidences and primitive flavors, the bitter olive, the tender wheat, the sour grapes.

Shielding a mountain, which turns its stern face and imposing bulk to the sea, the of iron hills that plummet into the sea, man has drawn this horizon, domestic, but only in appearance: Native are the olive, fig and vine trees, and higher up the chestnut trees, but then everything else comes from outside: the cypresses of Persia, the orange trees of Arabia and the cedars of Lebanon, the apricots of Palestine and the medlars of Japan, the palms of Africa.

A land that welcomes and naturalizes exotic plants and fruit trees, and then again vegetables and greens, just as it welcomes and naturalizes outsiders: lonely wayfarers and straggling warriors, distracted travelers, curious people and off-course artists.

A land as accustomed to the dampness of sirocco as it is to the storm of libeccio, or the weary becalmedness of Provence, but not to the frost of tramontana, which lulls alone on the mountainsides, it is nonetheless from the sea that it receives the smells of the world and the calls of adventure.

In the clear air of the sunset, Elba, and Capraia and Gorgona, and up to Palmaria, in the face of Portovenere, seem to invite toward another sea, while from above the grazing of goats, the pastures of shepherds, the potholes of giants, suddenly materialize the myth of Orpheus, dark and troubling.

But the shadows of dark omens have not tarnished the swarm of images that the sea has always poured onto the beaches, into that everyday panorama where the dream of myth and the toil of history are mirrored and confused.
To all this is dedicated this exhibition, articulated as follows: