Sculptures in the City - Spoleto 1962

Have you noticed that while walking around Spoleto you happen to come across large contemporary sculptures and installations? If you have passed them because you were headed elsewhere, we advise you to retrace your steps: these works were the protagonists of an incredible story that made Spoleto, for a few days, the center of the world.

It was 1962. Born out of the artistic fervor generated by the "Festival of the Two Worlds," the basic idea was not entirely new; present and past in the art world had already met inside historic palaces or museums. However, Giovanni Caradente, curator of the "Festival of Two Worlds" exhibitions, decided to break the pattern and bring the works of the most famous contemporary artists directly to the streets and squares of Spoleto. In the year it was created, this exhibition spread through the streets and squares of the city was pure avant-garde, an event so futuristic and ingenious that it made headlines all over the world. The leading sculptors of the time were invited to participate in what became the exhibition "Sculptures in the City - Spoleto 1962" so that they could create works to be temporarily exhibited in the streets and squares of the ancient city: Arnaldo Pomodoro, Pietro Consagra, Lucio Fontana, Kenneth Armitage just to name a few. Such an important event could not be relegated to the past, so some artists decided to donate their works to the city, and these are precisely the sculptures we can still admire today.