Modern Tuscany: contemporary architecture and art

About Modern Tuscany: contemporary architecture and art

By the ULTIMATE Tuscany Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Tuscany is famous for what it built five hundred years ago. Less well known is how boldly it has built since: the 20th and 21st centuries have left Florence a landmark of modern Italian architecture, Prato a gold-clad centre for contemporary art, and the hills of Chianti, Bolgheri and the Maremma a string of wineries by some of the world’s great architects. This is a guide to the modern buildings, and to the art inside them.

Florence goes modern

Most visitors arrive in Florence through its first modern masterpiece without noticing. Santa Maria Novella station, opened in 1935, was designed by the Gruppo Toscano, six young Tuscan architects led by Giovanni Michelucci. It is a low, compact block of horizontal lines, faced in the same warm pietraforte stone as the basilica beside it, so that the old church still rules the square. Inside, look for the verde Alpi and giallo di Siena marbles, the travertine portals from Rapolano and the original bronze lettering.

Michelucci’s other great work is a short drive west, where the A1 motorway passes Campi Bisenzio. The Church of San Giovanni Battista, known to every Italian driver as the Chiesa dell’Autostrada, was built between 1960 and 1964 for the motorway company in memory of the workers who died building the road. Its roof rises like a great tent, a symbol of a people on the move, to 26 metres. It stands at the Firenze Nord junction, on Via Limite, and makes a memorable stop on the way into or out of Florence.

Tuscany never stopped building: it simply moved from the cathedral square to the hillside and the vineyard.

In the city itself, west of the centre, Manifattura Tabacchi is turning a 1930s tobacco factory of sixteen rationalist buildings into a new quarter of studios, gardens, events and homes, with SANAA and Piuarch among its architects; our companion story on Tuscan art tells its history. And in the Renaissance courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi brings contemporary artists face to face with the old city: its exhibition Broken: Il potere del frammento runs until 24 January 2027.

Prato and the Centro Pecci

Just north-west of Florence, Prato has one of Italy’s first centres for contemporary art. The Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci opened in 1988 in a building by Italo Gamberini, himself one of the young architects of Santa Maria Novella. In 2016 it reopened with an extension by the Dutch architect Maurice Nio: a great golden ring that wraps around the old building and seems to hover above the ground. Come for the exhibitions, and for the building alone.

San Gimignano’s contemporary gallery

Among the medieval towers of San Gimignano, Galleria Continua has shown contemporary art since 1990 in a former cinema. Founded by three friends, Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi and Maurizio Rigillo, it has grown into an international gallery with spaces from Beijing and Havana to Paris, Rome, São Paulo and Dubai, yet its home is still this hill town. It is the perfect counterpoint to a morning of frescoes: step off the medieval street into some of the most ambitious art being made today.

Wineries by great architects

The most exciting modern architecture in Tuscany is in the vineyards. Visit Tuscany, the region’s official tourism site, counts a dozen design wineries, and several are works by famous names. At Bargino in Chianti Classico, Archea Associati buried the Antinori winery in the hillside in 2012, with vines growing on its roof. At Gavorrano in the Maremma, Renzo Piano designed Rocca di Frassinello, built in 2007 by Castellare di Castellina and Domaines Barons de Rothschild – Château Lafite, where a tower draws light down into the barrel cellar below.

On the Etruscan Coast at Suvereto, Mario Botta dug the Petra winery into the hillside around a great cylindrical volume, so that from outside it is almost invisible. Near the Maremma coast, Piero Sartogo and Nathalie Grenon shaped the Frescobaldi family’s Tenuta Ammiraglia in 2006 like the prow of a ship, half hidden by planting. And on Elba, Tobia Scarpa set the cellar of Fattoria delle Ripalte against a hill once used for mining. In Chianti, Castello di Ama takes another approach: it invites contemporary artists to make work for the estate itself.

Most of these estates take visitors only on booked tours and tastings, so plan ahead and check each estate’s own website. A winery a day, with lunch on the terrace, is the ideal rhythm.

Pietrasanta, the sculptors’ town

Below the marble peaks of the Apuan Alps, Pietrasanta has been a town of sculptors for generations. Its marble workshops and art foundries have cast and carved for artists from all over the world, Fernando Botero and Igor Mitoraj among them, and sculpture fills its squares and alleys as an open-air park of contemporary work. The Museo dei Bozzetti shows the plaster models from which the finished sculptures were made, a rare glimpse of an artist’s process. Pair it with a day on the Versilia coast.

The Tarot Garden

In the Maremma hills near Capalbio, Niki de Saint Phalle spent more than two decades, from 1979 until her death in 2002, building the Giardino dei Tarocchi: monumental figures of the 22 Major Arcana of the tarot, covered in mirror and ceramic mosaic. Jean Tinguely turned her Wheel of Fortune into a fountain. It is one of the great artist’s gardens of the 20th century, joyful and strange in equal measure.

The garden is open every day from 1 April to 15 October, and booking online is strongly recommended. Go early, when the light is soft and the mosaics glitter.

Our advice: arrive in Florence by train and look at the station properly; spend an afternoon at the Centro Pecci in Prato; book one architect’s winery in advance; and save the Tarot Garden for a spring or early-autumn day in the Maremma. Then cross the border to the Riviera for its villas by the sea.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Modern Tuscany: contemporary architecture and art before you go.