Sculpture: Earth to earth

The park was founded nearly 25 years ago by a trio of friends from Borgo Valsugana, a small town near Trento in the Italian Alps: Carlotta Strobele, a philosophy graduate whose Viennese family’s connections with the area go back to when the region formed part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire; Emanuele Montibeller, a former market trader in fabrics and a local councillor; and Enrico Ferrari, an architect — all of whom shared a passion for contemporary art. It now covers a wide area in Val di Sella, a secluded valley of forest, glades and rolling meadows, high above Borgo, at the end of a narrow road that zigzags its way up precipitous and densely wooded slopes, beneath a chain of peaks over 6,000-feet high.

In 1986 a dozen artists from various countries were asked to Carlotta Strobele’s summer house in Val di Sella and invited to create an artwork. Since then more than 200 artists from all over Europe and countries as distant as Azerbaijan, South Africa, Israel, the US, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan have constructed site-specific sculptures, reached by a series of winding ‘art-nature’ paths.