Gastone Novelli

In the early 1960s, when his devotion to searching for a primordial language rooted in mythology and the unconscious was clear, Gastone Novelli built his house in Saturnia and turned the town of Etruscan origin into a meeting place for other artists and intellectuals.

The book, edited by Anna Cristina Caputi and Guglielmo Buda, is dedicated precisely to Novelli's relationship with these places, and is published to coincide with the exhibition of the same name. The drawings from the Saturnia series and the other works – including the Montagne sculptures – are placed side by side with archaeological finds from the historic Ciacci Collection, alluding to the artist's choice to draw from reality in a subjective way and highlighting the link with the Etruscan heritage, which is also explored in Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli's essay. Retaining the evocative and dreamlike charge of the Maremma landscape, Novelli's works, however, restore a mental and interior space that seems to recall that “other reality” that the artist investigated in his research.