Word: spoleto
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...butcher outside his shop in Spoleto, Italy, leans against an ancient Roman wall topped by an abstract angel of golden bronze. Women in rusty black shawls on their way to Mass at the Church of San Domenico step gingerly past a giant iron spider. Families sipping Campari in a sidewalk cafe ponder a guitar cut from steel and mounted on a flatcar. All over town, modern sculptures of bronze and steel and iron loom over fountains, peer from alleys (see color}. Now that the initial shock is wearing off, the Spoletani are getting used to and even beginning...
...Carandente also wanted sculpture created expressly for Spoleto, and sought help from Italsider, Italy's state-controlled steelmaker. Italsider agreed to provide big ironworking shops for ten sculptors (three Americans, one Englishman, six Italians) -an invitation that appealed most of all to David Smith, one of the U.S.'s most active artist-welders...
Feeling like the sorcerer's apprentice, Carandente desperately sought to find some place for the gusher of art he had tapped. Finally he hit upon a ist century Roman amphitheater near Spoleto's Piazza della Liberta. A few days before the Festival of Two Worlds opened, an enormous truck lumbered into town from the Voltri mill groaning with no fewer than 25 pieces by David Smith...
Lasting Effect. The show closes at the end of August, but a number of souvenirs will remain in Spoleto as a permanent reminder of the summer when 106 works by 52 sculptors enlivened its streets and piazzas. David Smith has donated a circle pierced by a swirling, wavelike bar, supported by a pair of pincers ("It has more grace than most of my work, so I thought it belonged there"); Lynn Chadwick's batlike, three-legged Stranger III will remain on the ramp leading up from the duomo; Nino Franchini's leaping spire of torn steel will stay...
When welding is complete, it could cost more to remove than it cost to make. So it, too, will stay in Spoleto...