When Mayor Antonio Cirri's Carmignano City Council asked Quinto Martini Jèr a sculpture to embellish the town square of Seano, the artist proposed the idea not of a statue, "which would have remained isolated, cut off fr. om the surrounding environrnent, nor the great number of virtual bowling pins that stud so many other town squares in Italy, but sornething different, a boulder for example, a stone fr. agrnent that rnight have rolled down there by chance from a mountain top".1
1 From the Presentation of the Museurn-Park with Sculptures by Quinto Martini, Seano lime 28, 1981.
2 For this purpose Martini chose Antonio Di Tommaso, a sculptor gifted with a great technical exactitude.
3 From an interview with the artist by Arrigo Cecchi for «La Nazione» of December 7, 1984.
4 From an interyiew by M. Moretti for «La Nazione», October 31, 1988, p.6.
I shall try to explain why the project of the Museum-Park of Seano is an important initiative, perhaps beyond what its promotors themselves have supposed. What does this project consist of ? In creating a central open space for different kinds of leisure activities, a multi-faceted space, a triangulation of diverse overlapping functions, a combination of natural and artificial materials, all animated by the group of sculptures donated by a Tuscan artist who was deeply linked to the local scene.
Each of these elements, taken by itself, could certainly find a place in projects and experiences actualized elsewhere; as a single unit, though, they constitute an exemplary phenomenon, and perhaps even an alternative one as regards current practice.
Firstly, these facilities constitute a significant increment of fixed social and existing public capital, helping to balance out the dialectic of urban development which is too heavily weighted toward a private appropriation of space (while it has been said, quite justly, that no true leisure can exist without free public space). There is a second aspect directly linked to the first: and this refers to the notion of socially oriented leisure time – with no consumer finality – made available to all, collectively. The metropolis – not only the metropolis, but the outskirts too, vacation spots, and even the interiors of our homes – are continually bombarded by the mass media which invite us to partake of an infinite individual comsumption of new object-spaces or new space-objects, exchange rather than use values; here, in this Seano project, leisure time, physical exercise, entertainment, converge upon a cultural qualification, immersed in a network of social relationships. The Museum-Park thus becomes an area of aggregation of a type so lacking in the contemporary city. One of the ways by which our cities – big and small – may be reclaimed in through our social services, which are among the most versatile sectors for triggering an innovative process, precisely because it is based on non-hierarchical facilities.
But there is one more very important fact. By having combined with this original collection of statuary a set of functions which constituting a clear response to so often neglected biological and social needs, the Museum-Park has become a very important nexus of identification for the small community of Seano, a symbolic, geographical reference point: in short, it qualifies itself as a 'presence" in the area's complex multiform reality, leading us to conceptualize its space in terms of "place". We could spend further high-sounding words on this point, but let us stop here: it is certain that the process of urbanization of the past thirty years, now partially in crisis, has not just brought economic depauperization to the outskirts and the countryside in contrast to the inner cities, but it has also greatly reduced or annulled the significant features of the socio-economic, spatial and productive context (at one time composed of fairs, markets, events and local traditions). Even on this front there is need for intelligent conservation, a new equilibrium. And those whose task it is to oversee the development of a contemporary city's organization, too often pressured by the crushing problems of the metropolis, should not ignore or underestimate the extent of these trends even in the smaller communities: not only because indifference to the overall processes of reorganization of the area's reality is counterproductive, and not only because a balanced urban development can truly be defined only on the level of the entire space set aside for popular habitation and use, but also because of the specific, immediate influence that certain initiatives, such as this one in Seano, can exert on the area's crucial problems.
And in this context the Museum-Park of Seano is truly alternative: since it serves as a proving ground for unusual values through the formulation of speculative urban concepts, and constitutes in this respect an anticipation, albeit partial, of a different kind of city environment.