Homage to Benozzo Gozzoli

2007

In 2004 the Municipality of Peccioli and Belvedere S.p.A. bought the farming company Fondi

Rustici S.r.l., previously owned by the Gaslini Foundation from Genoa; the property consists of 900

hectares of land and about 40 farmhouses, including an ancient two-storey building in a green area.

This building, called Casino di Belvedere thanks to its position, had the function of a meeting place

for the nobles: it is commonly known as Caffè Haus (or Kaffeehaus), a name dating back to the

Leopoldino cadastre in the first half of the 19th century, in a reference to the Middle-European social

and cultural background of the time. After many years of abandonment, the area of Caffè Haus was

cleaned and made safe, and the premises, formerly used as a garage, have been fully recovered and

turned into a new wooden structure positioned in a panoramic spot, a natural "window" that widely

overlooks over the entire property of Fondi Rustici, a clear example of Tuscan setting.

Inside the structure, the artist Mariella Bettineschi installed the work Homage to Benozzo

Gozzoli 2007, recovering and re-elaborating, from a modern perspective, the "toil" of the artist who

left an unfading mark in the chapel of Santa Caterina in Legoli. Bettineschi stands out on the

international scene for her continuous search for feminine languages that are able to illustrate

through painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, photography and digital painting, the centrality of

women and their infinite ability to bring the world into the world. A complex and multi-faceted

world that allows us to look at our existence in a different way, to bring it to a different time, in the

spaces between things, from the second to the fourth dimension, presenting it as a promise of the

future. Memory and future, life, being and past are phases of time and themes that are reassembled

as a continuous flow, reworked as signs, forms and images that appear as landscapes, human

figures, or as depositories of culture or else as other and further dimensions.

Bibliography

www.mariellabettineschi.com

Peccioli, Caffè Haus