Parco Internazionale della Scultura Contemporanea

Pietrasanta keeps its sculpture outside as well as in. The Parco Internazionale della Scultura Contemporanea comprises monumental works by Botero, Mitoraj, Deredia and dozens of others installed in streets, squares and gardens of the centre and its frazioni.

Why it matters

The official Art Bonus page describes the park as the ideal open-air continuation of the Museo dei Bozzetti, and that is the clearest way to understand it: the models displayed in the cloister of Sant'Agostino reached completion, left the workshops, and stayed. Over 75 works of monumental contemporary sculpture are sited in public spaces owned by the Comune di Pietrasanta, which holds the collection and keeps it on show without walls. The park is the most direct expression of why the town is called the Little Athens: art is not preserved apart from daily life here, it is street furniture, meeting point and backdrop at once.

What to notice

Fernando Botero's 1992 bronze Il Guerriero stands in Piazza del Duomo. Nearby works by Igor Mitoraj include the Centauro and the Annunciazione, whose wrapped, fragmentary classicism forms a contrast with the surrounding architecture. The museum's own catalogue of the park records works from many countries and decades, from Franco Adami's Il giudizio del Minotauro of 1992 to Helaine Blumenfeld's Flame of 2015 and Giovanni Balderi's Venere of 2019, proof that the collection grows rather than freezes. At Marina di Pietrasanta, Jiménez Deredia's marble sculpture-fountain Continuación was installed in 2008.

The dispersed collection includes more than eighty sculptures.

Context and history

The park took shape as public administrations and private supporters kept commissioning and donating works for the town's squares, turning an exhibition habit into a permanent civic collection. The Art Bonus register records restoration and enhancement campaigns in 2016, 2019 and 2021, the last supported by liberal donations from the local banking foundation, a financing model that mirrors the public-private pattern that built the collection itself. The works' presence also fed back into the workshop economy: sculptors could test their ideas with local artisans, and the town kept the results in view, an arrangement documented across the museum system of Pietrasanta and celebrated in the nickname, the Little Athens, that Visit Tuscany confirms. The regional portal describes the dispersed open-air works as a defining element of the town's cultural landscape.