Monday was a ‘do nothing’
day so we spent the morning reading and puzzling, oh and Karen did some
knitting. Actually, that’s not quite
true because Karen went for a run first thing and Buddy and I went
butterflying. Later in the afternoon we
walked a couple of miles further up the hillside to find our water source. A mountain stream has been dammed and water
is stored in a large underground tank that supplies several of the properties
on the hillside including the one we are staying in.
During the walk we came
across several areas where trees have been cleared and barbecue areas have been
installed:
On Sunday night the wind
had got up and Monday was about 10 degrees colder than we have been used to and
the wind made it feel even colder. Apparently, it’s only going to last a couple of
days, so we will make sure we go back up and use one of the barbecues when it
warms up again.
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| Buddy was happy to find his own water source just at the point by the dam and holding tank |
We were pleased to find a
map of a footpath at one point. I say
pleased because we haven’t found any paths for walking on the mountain yet –
all the trails have been for mountain bikers only.
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| At last a path we can follow and according to the direction sign nearby it is about 7km from the top of the map to the bottom |
On our way back home. we
stopped in the butterfly fields for a while and finally got a picture of a clouded
yellow albeit, only partly as the wind was blowing the grass stalks.
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| Clouded yellow at rest |
We spent the best part of Tuesday
at Daniel Spoerri’s 40-acre garden just outside Seggiano which is only six
miles from us. He is an 88-year old
Swiss artist who bought his Seggiano house in 1997 and has opened his gardens for
the public to see many of his works that he has installed there. We’re not normally into this sort of thing
but being so close (and he’s famous apparently) we paid it a visit.
Coupled with the fact that
dogs are allowed and, being at the bottom of the mountain meant it was a lot
warmer, we had a pleasant few hours wandering around and gradually began to
understand some of the pieces.
When we arrived, we were
told that the best place to start was at his, ‘Circle of unicorns’ as we would feel
all the energy that it harnesses from Monte Amiato. We should also make sure we saw the piece
entitled ‘Chambre 13 Hotel Carcasonne’.
She wouldn’t tell us anything about it as she wanted it to be a total surprise
for us.
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| Circle of unicorns: Couldn’t feel any energy other than the sun but it was our first piece after all |
Next, we came across the
installation shown at the top, a piece called Dies Irea by another Swiss artist
called Olivier Osteppey. In all there
were 112 pieces (half were by the resident artist) and we became so impressed
that we saw all of them. What we found particularly
good was, that with so much space, the pieces weren’t crammed in like they
would be in an enclosed gallery.
I won’t bore you with
pictures of all the pieces but have picked out a few that either impressed us
or made us chuckle. If you really are
interested I have included a few more pictures at the bottom of this blog entry too.
Daniel Spoerri introduced
snare pictures; a form of art where he captured people’s (usually famous people)
actual meal settings as a form of art. None
of these forms were included but a depiction of some of them was shown in the
form of marble sculptures placed on a wall:
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| Carved snare art taken from the likes of Marlene Dietrich |
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| Karen inside the surprise 😊 |
Chambre 13 was a bronze
work (as is most of them) and in a container placed at an angle in the trees,
hence the reason for Karen’s stance.
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| Showing the sense of space |
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| Me being contemplative |
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| This shows the scale of some of the works |
And a few more:
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