Collezione Gori - Arte Ambientale e Giardini Storici

A textile man moves to the hills

Giuliano Gori was born in Prato in 1930 and made his money in textiles, the trade that city has lived on for centuries. He was already collecting when, in 1970, he moved his family and his pictures to the Villa di Celle at Santomato, a 19th-century estate on the slopes above Pistoia that had belonged to the Fabbroni family. Andy Warhol painted his portrait in 1974, by which point the farmhouse was a regular stopping place for critics and artists passing through Tuscany.

What set Celle apart was a rule Gori borrowed from his friend, the critic Carlo Belli: the rights of art begin where those of nature end. In practice this meant that from around 1980 an invited artist lived on the estate for as long as the work took, walked the park and the olive groves, and chose the spot. Once chosen, the spot became part of the piece. Nothing at Celle was made to be moved, sold or lent, and Gori described collecting as taking part in a work's making rather than owning the result. He handled the engineering and the arguments with builders himself, and thought of the artists who came through as a kind of extended family.

Twelve June 1982 and what followed

The collection opened to the public on 12 June 1982 with eighteen works in place. Richard Serra, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mauro Staccioli were among the first names, alongside Robert Morris, whose Labirinto dates from that year, Dennis Oppenheim, Dani Karavan, Alice Aycock, Ulrich Rückriem, George Trakas, Anne and Patrick Poirier and Fausto Melotti in the open air. Inside the farm buildings the opening group included Nicola De Maria, Luciano Fabro, Mimmo Paladino, Giuseppe Penone, Gianni Ruffi and Gilberto Zorio. Alberto Burri's Grande Ferro Celle went in at the entrance in 1986, and Daniel Buren's La Cabane Éclatée aux 4 Salles arrived in 2005. Sol LeWitt, Anselm Kiefer, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Loris Cecchini are also represented.

The foundation's own count today is roughly fifty outdoor installations in the park and olive groves and more than thirty interior works in the villa and outbuildings, spread over about 45 hectares. There are no temporary exhibitions and no rotation. The pieces change only with the seasons and with age, which is the point of them.

Gori's influence ran beyond his own gate. He was a co-founder of the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato in 1988, and Celle has been formally twinned with the Fondation Maeght at Saint-Paul-de-Vence since 2012. The collection has been shown abroad in Japan in 1999, in Valencia in 2003 and in France in 2012.

After Giuliano

The fortieth anniversary was marked on 11 June 2022 with a performance in memory of Dani Karavan by his daughter Yael Karavan, a photographic show by Luca Gilli, the presentation of an unpublished poetry collection by Giuseppe Conte, and a staged reconstruction of the Brancusi customs trial devised by Gori with Massimo Luconi. Two new works were unveiled that day, by Vittorio Corsini and by Federico Gori. Interviewed for the occasion, Giuliano Gori said that he and his wife Pina had set out in the early 1980s to turn the classical idea of sculpture into permanent environmental work, with space itself as a component.

Giuliano Gori died on 25 January 2024, aged 94. In the same year his children Patrizia, Fabio, Paolo and Stefania set up the Fondazione Gori-Celle to carry on what their parents had begun. Its stated remit is to conserve the works already at Celle and to support younger practitioners through residencies, workshops and a strand of contemporary poetry. The first concrete programme is COABITAZIONI, two seven-month residencies for artists and curators aged 18 to 35, funded through the European Social Fund Plus to the value of 472,485.25 euros. The first residency is under way and applications for the second opened on 1 June 2026.

The garden comes back

The most visible change since Gori's death is not a new sculpture but an old garden. The villa's formal Italian garden, with its geometric box hedges, espaliered lemons, mosaics and wrought-iron gates topped with stone lions, had been closed to visitors for years. Its restoration was paid for under the PNRR culture programme for historic parks and gardens, working from 17th-century sketches by Ignazio Fabroni and a digital survey of the 19th-century planting. New interpretive signs were made from recycled wood by Rilegno.

It reopened on 8 June 2025 with a tour led by the agronomist Simona Giorgini and an early-evening concert of baroque music by the ensemble I fiori armonici. Since then the garden has been folded into the standard visit, which is why the 2026 tickets carry the title Arte Ambientale e Giardini Storici. Writing in October 2025, The Weekend Magazine described the family as balancing conservation with regeneration, using guided walks, theatre and poetry readings rather than acquisitions to keep the place alive.

Walking it in 2026

The 2026 season runs from 1 April to 31 October. The official site describes a break in August, although the Ticketmaster calendar also carries dates in the last week of that month, so the booking calendar is the thing to trust. Visits go out from Tuesday to Saturday at 10am and 2.30pm, moving to 3.30pm for the afternoon slot in June and July, plus the first Sunday of each month. Everything is by reservation, and individuals and small parties are put together into shared groups.

The standard walk lasts about three hours and the foundation is blunt that it is demanding: proper shoes, arrive on time, and the route cannot be shortened or left part way. Three variants sit alongside it. On the first Saturday of the month at 11am a poetry walk takes in less-visited corners of the park with recordings by poets who have worked at Celle since 2018. On Saturdays at 4pm a shorter one-hour walk is followed by a tasting of three of the estate's wines and its olive oil, the whole farm having converted to organic production in 2019. Schools have been coming since 2012 through the Vivarte association, with actor-guides working the children through the pieces.

Visitors rate it highly. Wanderlog's aggregate shows 4.7 out of 5 from 178 Google reviews and a full five from 21 on Tripadvisor. A review from 30 May 2025 singled out guides who read the works poetically and added music along the way, and a September 2024 visitor called the guided tour extremely interesting and recommended it without reservation. The recurring caveat, on Tripadvisor as elsewhere, is the walking: four to five hours on some older accounts, three on the current official one, and in every case a fixed route on hilly ground.