The butcher outside his shop in Spoleto, Italy, leans against an ancient Roman wall topped by an abstract angel of golden bronze. Women in rusty black shawls on their way to Mass at the Church of San Domenico step gingerly past a giant iron spider. Families sipping Campari in a sidewalk cafe ponder a guitar cut from steel and mounted on a flatcar. All over town, modern sculptures of bronze and steel and iron loom over fountains, peer from alleys (see color}. Now that the initial shock is wearing off, the Spoletani are getting used to and even beginning to like what they see, and art lovers from outside are ecstatic.
Beginning five years ago, the ancient town in the green Umbrian hills of central Italy has been the annual host of Gian Carlo Menotti's vaunted Festival of Two Worlds. Primarily a cultural Chautauqua of contemporary music and modern drama, the festival seemed to need another dimension. Last year Giovanni Carandente, ebullient gadfly in Italy's slow-moving museum bureaucracy, and champion of Italian sculptors in the international art markets, met Menotti and suggested a sculpture exhibition in the streets of the town.
Sorcerer's Apprentice. Enthusiast Menotti agreed, and Carandente went to work. Britain's Henry Moore promised to lend his totemlike Glenkiln Cross and a bronze Reclining Figure. Top Italian sculptors like Manzu and Marini were easily persuaded to lend important pieces.
Invitations went out to leading sculptors around the world to exhibit their work—not for prizes, but for the sheer satisfaction of showing them to a large audience out-of-doors, as ornaments for a beautiful town. Contributions came from Picasso, Arp, Armitage, Giacometti, Butler and dozens of others.
But Carandente also wanted sculpture created expressly for Spoleto, and sought help from Italsider, Italy's state-controlled steelmaker. Italsider agreed to provide big ironworking shops for ten sculptors (three Americans, one Englishman, six Italians) —an invitation that appealed most of all to David Smith, one of the U.S.'s most active artist-welders.
Three days after Smith arrived at Italsider's Voltri mill near Genoa, Carandente telephoned to find out how he was doing, was stunned to learn that Smith had already turned out six pieces. How could the festival display six Smiths when it was showing only two Moores? Unperturbed, Smith went back to work, planning to finish four more by the end of the week. Menotti was incredulous, Carandente was appalled. After a few days they phoned Smith again, were jolted to hear him announce that there were now 16 pieces cooling in the mill.
Feeling like the sorcerer's apprentice, Carandente desperately sought to find some place for the gusher of art he had tapped. Finally he hit upon a ist century Roman amphitheater near Spoleto's Piazza della Liberta. A few days before the Festival of Two Worlds opened, an enormous truck lumbered into town from the Voltri mill groaning with no fewer than 25 pieces by David Smith.