Let yourself be captivated by the stories and faces that have transformed Santarcangelo into the capital of the arts.
Santarcangelo is a microcosm where art springs forth spontaneously and permeates every alleyway.
Santarcangelo has been the cradle and home of art and artists in all its forms: from the revolutionary painting of Guido Cagnacci to the universal poetry of Tonino Guerra and Raffaello Baldini, right through to the contemporary satire of Fabio De Luigi and Daniele Luttazzi.A village that not only creates beauty, but also welcomes it from all over the world: since 1971, Santarcangelo has been the cosmopolitan stage for the historic Festival del Teatro in Piazza, and since the 1990s home to the famous artistic collective, the Mutoid Waste Company.
Born in Santarcangelo in 1601, Guido Cagnacci was one of the most extraordinary and tormented painters of the 17th century.
His art blends the elegance he learnt in Bologna from Guido Reni with the dramatic realism he discovered in Rome thanks to Caravaggio, giving rise to a unique style, imbued with naturalism and sensuality.
Today, Santarcangelo pays tribute to its illustrious son by housing two extraordinary masterpieces:
The altarpiece depicting the Infant Jesus, St Joseph and St Eligius (1635): A sight to behold inside the Collegiate Church.
The Madonna and Child: A splendid painting donated by Luigi Koelliker and on display at the MUSAS (Historical and Archaeological Museum).
“Toh, e circal de giudeizi!” (Here’s the circle of judgement!). It was with this ironic Romagna-style sarcasm that the townspeople christened a group of young, restless intellectuals who, immediately after the Second World War, began to meet in Santarcangelo. Their meeting place soon became the Caffè Trieste – run by the parents of the poet Raffaello Baldini – where, between a game of table football and a jazz record, they would discuss politics, neorealist cinema and banned literature.
This spontaneous collaboration, initially led by Flavio Nicolini, Nino Pedretti and Raffaello Baldini, gained extraordinary momentum with the return of Tonino Guerra from the prisoner-of-war camp. An incredible constellation of talent gathered around them: from the Roman painters of the ‘Portonaccio’ to local artists such as Federico Moroni, Giulio Turci and Lucio Bernardi, right through to key figures such as Rina Macrelli, Gianni Fucci, Tito Balestra and Alberto Sughi
A lecturer and passionate linguist, he succeeded in elevating the local language to the status of universal literature, achieving enormous success in 1975 with his first collection Al vòuşi (The Voices).
For Pedretti, dialect was an indomitable force of nature, which he liked to describe as follows:
“ Unlike Italian, enshrined in codes, polished and distinguished, its humble brother, the dialect, has thrived in the open air like a wild herb […] and like a stubborn weed […] it has covered every metre of land where ordinary people lived, working and making sacrifices.”
His legacy is now preserved in the museum dedicated to him‘Poems in the Landscape’, the art installations scattered throughout the town that you come across whilst strolling through the town.
The Mutonia Art Park Founded in London by Joe Rush and Robin Cooke, the Mutoid Waste Company is a renowned international community of cyberpunk sculptors and performers.
Having arrived in Santarcangelo in 1990 at the invitation of the Theatre Festival, the artists settled in an old quarry along the River Marecchia, founding Mutonia.Today, this village is an incredible open-air art park centred on creative recycling: here, industrial scrap is regenerated and transformed into gigantic avant-garde sculptures.
Visiting a painter’s home means stepping into the soul of someone who experienced the world through unique dreams and visions. The rooms of the house-museum of Giulio Turci preserve the nuances of his sensibility intact, translating his emotions directly onto the canvases. It is a poetic journey that sets out from the Romagna region to reach distant horizons, steeped in that same nostalgic atmosphere with its blurred contours, shared with his famous fellow Romagnoli Federico Fellini and Tonino Guerra.
Situated in the heart of Santarcangelo di Romagna, the artist’s home is a light-filled and unobtrusive attic, built in the early 1960s above the rooftops of the family’s turn-of-the-century house. It is accessed via a wooden staircase inside the house.
This space preserves, unchanged, the objects and tools used in the painter’s daily work:
Tools of the trade: brushes, canvases, inks, palette knives, chalks, the easel and tubes of oil paints.
Personal mementos: books, records, curiosities and games.
Everything has remained exactly as the artist loved to have it around him, offering an experience that deeply enriches the eyes and the soul.
Foto: pagina facebook Associazione Giulio Turci