L’antica Rocca dei Farnese vicino Parma ora si apre all’arte contemporanea
The Rocca Sanvitale in Sala Baganza, near Parma, opens its Farnese Apartment to contemporary art with the exhibition "Racconti Materici" (Material Tales) by Italian artist Brunivo Buttarelli (born 1946, Casalmaggiore). The show, running until November 29, 2026, marks Buttarelli's 80th birthday and surveys over forty years of his sculptural practice. His works—assembled from salvaged metal, industrial debris, corroded wood, and oxidized surfaces—resemble impossible archaeological relics or fossils of a future civilization, exploring themes of geological time, material memory, and transformation.
This exhibition matters because it stages a rare dialogue between contemporary sculpture and a historic Renaissance setting, the Rocca Sanvitale's 16th-century architecture and 18th-century frescoes by Sebastiano Galeotti. Buttarelli's practice of rescuing discarded materials and imbuing them with symbolic life speaks to urgent ecological and philosophical questions about consumption, waste, and regeneration. The show also highlights a growing trend of Italian historic sites opening their spaces to contemporary art, bridging past and present in ways that enrich both the art and the architecture.