La Fanciulla del Borgo
The artwork by Franco Summa in Borgotufi's panoramic piazza
Vivid colours outline the ideal femininity of the Fanciulla del Borgo (the Village Girl). At more that 3 meters tall, it stands out against the Apennine panorama that opens up from the pizza of Borgotufi, our multi-property hotel in Castel del Giudice (IS), where Molise's mountain peaks and woods brush up against those of Abruzzo.
A "strong and kind" girl in steel, this work of urban environmental art was designed by the Abruzzo-based artist Franco Summa for this place shortly before his death in 2020, and now gives light and shape to a village where every stone is history and a sign of rebirth. The initiative came about following an encounter between Summa, the interior designer Franco D’Amico and Enrico Ricci, an entrepreneur and one of the owners of our multi-building hotel – together with his brother Gianfranco, the entrepreneur Ermanno D’Andrea and the Municipality of Castel del Giudice – who had worked with the artist on the restoration of the Palazzo dell’Emiciclo in Aquila, the headquarters of Abruzzo's regional council.
It was inaugurated on 25 September 2020 by Enrico Ricci, the mayor of Castel del Giudice Lino Gentile, Giovanni Tavano, a friend of the artist and vice-president of the Summa Foundation who oversaw the execution of the work, in the presence of the director of Donna Moderna Annalisa Monfreda and Niko Romito, a Michellin-starred chef. Summa's art enriches a town where protection and recovery is a mantra. It is a town that has transformed its historical stables and abandoned houses into a multi-building site for tourist hospitality, which looks to the present as a return to the land, reinterpreting contemporaneity and transforming a depopulated place into a living centre, where art also becomes a central feature, alongside beauty and attraction.
A female figure with vivid colours. A young girl, a tapered icon of an ideal femininity that I imagine almost as a primordial goddess, a guardian and mother of the expansive earth that dominates from that balcony. Franco Summa
Franco Summa
Franco Summa (1938-2020), an exponent of Italian contemporary art from the mid-1970s onwards, developed artistic research focused on the relationship between humans and the environment in urban spaces. His art is characterised by the symbolic use of colour and shapes, in order to redevelop the contemporary city. It is an art that dialogues with places, their history and memory.
