Deva Manfredo calls his creations made with stones from the Sienese woods “stoneart”, fantastic constructions recalling miniature Indian temples or Oriental cities, mandalas or paths woven with the colours of nature.

Anthropomorphic figures seem to emerge from the earth in the oak woods of Podere San Giorgio, as if conversing with the foliage and trees. The artist creates this work by exploiting the attraction between stones he places meticulously side by side or one atop the other or wedged into another without the expedient of any glue or cement; gravity alone holds them together.
Working in this way since the early 1980s, Manfredo defines himself as a “composer of natural objects”. These woods invite visitors to linger, to experience themselves in the natural environment. For those who wish, there are guided meditations or workshops to stimulate one’s own creativity. Manfredo, a member of the Ohio Miasto community settled here, encourages visitors to remain silent and attentive to nature as they follow a path conceived as a sort of initiation rite into a different consciousness, in effect, a meditative practice to experience the inner self.

The garden created by collector Mario Ciulli in memory of his father Roberto (1919–1997) features more than twenty figurative and abstract sculptures in marble, travertine, bronze and wood by Italian and foreign artists. Located just outside of Monticiano, the garden stretches over three hectares among soft green hills that open onto the scenic view of San Galgano. The sculptures were made on site and then positioned by the owner against the background of the lovely Sienese landscape.

As of the end of 2014, the Museo Civico houses a new room dedicated to the Casole artist Augusto Bastianini (1875–1938), created thanks to the long-term loan by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage of the artist’s 1913 large-scale work, La ferratura del bove [Shoeing the Ox].

Bastianini portrays the rural life of farmers and peasants with a powerful late-Macchiaiolo realism, often in monumental paintings such as those in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Palazzo Pitti in Florence. His portraits were also much in demand for exhibits in Tuscany and throughout Italy in the first decades of the 1900s, when his self-portrait was acquired for the Uffizi collection.

The castle is both headquarters of the foundation founded in 1998 and the home and studio of Sergio Vacchi (1925).

A permanent exhibition of Vacchi’s work was recently set up in the former stables, documenting his career from the youthful neo-Cubist work after Second World War to the later, more visionary figurative paintings with their expressionist sensibility and dramatic colours. The collection includes several important cycles of this singular pictorial language from the 1960s through to contemporary work, including Galileo, Planet, Shining Pools, Initiation Gates and a series of portraits Vacchi painted in the 1980s of friends, intellectuals and artists he particularly esteemed, including Franz Kafka, Francesco Arcangeli, Greta Garbo, and Francis Bacon.

Crystal production dates back to the beginning of the 1800s.

The museum dedicated to historic Colle Val d’Elsa glassmaking is located in an underground space previously occupied by furnaces of the nineteenth-century factory of Cristallerie e Vetrerie Schmidt, later Vetreria Boschi. The museum documents the technical evolution of this industrial production from the first furnace to the production of lead crystal in the early 1960s. Another section displays the objects themselves, from old engraved pieces to contemporary glass design. Finally, the visitor passes through a sort of “crystal forest”, symbol of the prominent role in the international glass market played by Colle Val d’Elsa, which produces virtually all the crystal made in Italy.

The sculpture park was inaugurated in 1995 in the natural habitat surrounding the village of Iesa, near Terme del Petriolo. Most of the fifty works by Swiss artist Kurt Laurenz Metzler (1941) represent “hominids”, in this case urban-seeming pedestrians in ordinary poses, made in a wide variety of materials, including iron, marble, aluminum, bronze and painted resin.

Metzler’s work seems like a kind of “street theatre”, observed Enrico Crispolti, “to give an emblematically ‘disalienating’ image of the man of our times”. The artist suggests a clear disconnect between his city characters and the surrounding countryside, and yet, standing there in the shade of the trees, they seem to reveal an “innate adaptability”.

In 1996, American artist Sheppard Craige started a topiary work of art at Ragnaia, and it is still evolving to this day. At first sight, some of the more orderly views of symmetrical plants recall historic gardens all’italiana.

Entering the woods, however, it becomes clear that Craige created each detail with his unique poetic flair. Along the way, one passes the Altar of Scepticism, the Centre of the Universe, and the Oracle of Oneself. While there is no specific symbolism underlying the project, there are occasional features inspired by the past, sayings in Latin and various modern languages, fountains and pools, and curious out-of-scale groups — abandoned sculptures, forest animals reduced to handles for earthenware pots, and small and large changes to the landscape that intensify the enigmatic quality of the park, encouraging individual interpretations of this magic atmosphere. Indeed, the artist says that sages reign over these woods.

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The gallery is named after the Milanese painter Raffaele De Grada (1885–1957), who adopted San Gimignano as his second home. First opened in 2002 under the direction of Enrico Crispolti, the museum displays artwork dating from the early twentieth to the twenty-first century.

After the impressive somewhat surreal paintings by Giannetto Fieschi, the chronological itinerary begins with two small monographic rooms devoted respectively to Niccolò Cannicci and Raffaele De Grada. Next come works acquired in or after the 1970s, through the Premio De Grada (Guttuso, Sassu, Vacchi, etc.), the Grande Adesione exhibit of abstract art curated by Andrea Del Guercio in 1985, and subsequent initiatives up until 2000, which multiplied the museum’s collection with important donations.
A documentary section with material on extended loan from Associazione Arte Continua is dedicated to Affinità Elettive and Arte all’Arte. Recently, a bequest by the Pacchiani Collection has further enriched the museum with Italian paintings from the 1930s to the 1980s by renowned artists including Casorati, Campigli, Carrà, De Chirico, Sironi, Soffici, Mafai, Morlotti, and Adami. There is also a space for temporary exhibits

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Arte all’Arte, promoted by the Associazione Arte Continua of San Gimignano, was inaugurated in 1996. From the very beginning, it rose to the challenge of the diversity of the Siena region with its close interaction between town and country, between outlying and industrialized areas in a stratified environment whose origins go back to antiquity. To achieve its stated goal of interweaving “the far-reaching scope of history with the language of the contemporary”, the project is divided into two parts: Arte, Architettura, Paesaggio and Rinascimento Nascimento. In its ten exhibits every year from 1996 to 2005, Arte all’Arte brought 84 international artists and twenty curators to the Siena region, establishing bridges between the local culture and relevant aspects of world culture.

Among the permanent installations are Ilya Kabakov’s The Weakening Voice, 1998, in Colle Val d’Elsa; Mimmo Paladino’s I dormienti [The Sleepers], 1998–2000, at the Fonte delle Fate, Poggibonsi; Nari Ward’s Illuminated Sanctuary of Empty Sins, 2001, at the Poggibonsi incinerator; and Antony Gormley’s Fai spazio/Prendi Posto [Make Room/Take a Place], 2004, in various sites around Poggibonsi.

The project concluded in 2005 with an evocative underground installation by Anish Kapoor entitled Underground. Then in 2008, however, the American artist Kiki Smith donated three more sculptures, one each for San Gimignano, Colle Val d’Elsa and Poggibonsi, which will be positioned soon.
The Galleria De Grada recently allocated a room to document this project through the years

Affinità, a project curated by Giuliano Briganti and Luisa Laureati between 1991 and 1994, involves works that appear unexpectedly throughout San Gimignano, intended to offer a more “active” and less postcard-like experience of the famous medieval town.

The art takes the form of “infiltrations” (R. Fuchs) of the contemporary in public spaces. Eschewing the monumental, the works are intended to reinvigorate outlying or decaying parts of town or to revitalize the cultural and aesthetic value of certain sites. The pieces, by five Arte Povera artists, can be seen in the church of San Jacopo (Kounellis’ San Gimignano), the church of Sant’Agostino (Paolini’s Meridiana), on the vault of vicolo dei Bongi (Nunzio’s Senza titolo [Untitled]), in Palazzo del Podestà (Fabro’s L’Italia all’asta [Italy on Auction]), and on a spur of the Rocca (Mattiacci’s Equilibrio compresso [Compressed Equilibrium]).

A room in the Galleria De Grada  displays sketches, photographs and letters documenting the Affinità project.