Until 21 October, at Giarre (CT), the debut edition of the biennial Radicepura Garden Festival, organized by the Radicepura foundation in the park of the same name.
It is the first Italian event of international scope on Mediterranean landscape, and hosts four famous garden designers – James Basson, Michel Péna, Stefano Passerotti, Kamelia Bin Zaal – each creating 150 m2 of green areas.
And six young European landscape designers selected in a competition, presenting gardens from 30 to 50 m2, for a total of ten site-specific works, plus four botanical installations (the botanical-artistic Anamorphosis of François Abélanet; Giardino Italia, a boot rich in Italian biodiversity; the Garden of the Mediterranean Diet, by the studio Coloco; La Macchia by Donatello Chirico; the complex Herbarium project by the Sicilian artist Alfio Bonanno with Galleria Collicaligreggi of Catania; and, in September, also a site-specific work by Emilio Isgrò in the park), all made with the ‘vegetable products’ of Piante Faro, with 800 species and over 5000 varieties, exported all over the world.
With art direction by Pablo Georgieff, Radicepura Garden Festival sets out to underline the value – also in Italy – of landscape culture, in a tribute to nature and the Mediterranean, which continues to be the cradle of our culture.
A driving force for new economic-cultural development of the territory, Radicepura Garden Festival is the first landscape event organized inside a nursery, as well as the first in Italy that is structured to resemble the superlative Festival International des Jardins of Chaumont-sur-Loire (until 5 November).
The Sicilian festival is accompanied by Il Giardino delle Meraviglie (Donzelli editore), a book on the ornamental plants of the Mediterranean, with watercolors by Lucia Scuderi. The festival is open to visitors every day from 10.00 to 19.00, with tickets costing 15 euros that also bring a discount price (4 euros) for a visit to the garden of Kolymbethra, an archaeological site in the Valley of the Temples of Agrigento, one of the sites protected by FAI. (Text by Olivia Cremascoli)
