It’s easy to become enamored of Torano. Perhaps because of the extreme kindness of those who, surreptitiously, sometimes water your flowers (which you have sadly neglected). Perhaps because everyone you meet unfailingly returns your greeting, hurriedly or even rather sourly and dryly, in “Toranese style,” but always with a slight smile which extends a welcome.
To tell the truth, the rugged character of the Toranesi is no legend. Anyone who chooses to come and carve out a space for living and loving here will have to be acting from conviction.
So what’s behind “Torano Amore Mio”?
The sculpture event was founded twelve years ago by a group of sculptors and friends. It is an almost magical exhibition: over the years it has grown and established itself as a niche event in the world of international sculpture exhibitions. Now it is an exhibition organized by a courageous small group of native and adopted Toranesi, who decided it was right and proper to keep it going, per forza e per amore as they say in my parts in Contrada.
It is also a symbol or a citation of an exhibition at Montepulciano in the early 1970s, which saw the departure of a group of young talents who eventually became leading figures in the art world.
It is an act, a gesture, a solemn affirmation in the lives of all of us.
Again taking an example from the refinement of Batignano, where the founders decided that the concerts of the exquisite Musica nel Chiostro should not be either photographed or recorded, Torano shuns major advertising campaigns. It needs to be sought out.
For those who have never seen the exhibition or browsed through a catalog of it, the following details will be useful. Torano is a small village between Carrara and the quarries. It has some five hundred inhabitants, with many resident artists and others who arrive in the sculpture season. The earliest quarries date back to the first century B.C., under the aegis of Luni. Torano is mentioned in its current form in 1099. Later, in the Renaissance and even more the Baroque, the village became one of the focal points for marble workers, peaking in neoclassical times.
In these periods, sculptors from Torano, such as Domenico Guidi, Giuliano Finelli, Pietro Tenerani and many others, worked in many parts of Italy and Europe, while families such as the Fabbricotti grew to prominence and were seen as true representatives of marble and were famous worldwide.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century Torano finally rediscovered sculpture. It is not a carefully groomed village the way so many villages in Chiantishire unfortunately now are (the writer is Sienese) but definitely worth a visit, especially when it is animated with sculptures that speak all sorts of languages and appear suddenly in the little squares, in side streets or next to the fountain spurting water or the campanile which keeps ringing “Night and Day.”
Pier Giorgio Balocchi - Photos: Antonio Cozza
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