picture of Silvia Meacci
A new park on the hill has opened to the public San Miniato, next to Iris Garden and Piazzale Michelangelo. The municipal administration has decided to reclaim the area, which until 2015 was intended for camping use, and renovate it to give residents a green, panoramic, quiet place. “After years of degradation and abandonment it is returned to the citizens and the neighborhood – underlined the environmental councilor Andrea Giorgio – we strongly wanted a space for everyone, not a tourist one, where we can relax and participate in cultural activities, increasingly convinced that greenery can be a new way of building sociality”.
The tender for the management of the cultural space will open shortly and the garden will also be one of the locations of the Florentine Summer. An intervention financed by European funds to rearrange the original olive grove of 700 terraced plants sloping down to Via dei Bastioni.
Now tourists will also have another alternative to get to Piazzale Michelangelo, but only the most informed, those who get on foot and don’t get off the Gran Turismo buses in a hurry.
They will be able to climb up, rest and enjoy the beauty of this sheet of land, nestled close to the Piazzale. It is a neighborhood garden that the Florentine administration hopes will be appreciated and cared for: it features usable paths, benches, sown flowerbeds, meditative spaces, areas equipped for picnics or five-a-side football. An oasis of peace useful for decongesting and disposing of the residents’ unpleasant sensation of being constantly invaded by the mass of hit-and-run tourists.
In these four hectares of land we have tried to preserve the original atmosphere. A very positive note is the commissioning of young artists, belonging to the Streets Levels Gallery, to decorate hundreds of square meters of surfaces, bathrooms and pre-existing masonry structures. They are completing the work to the rhythm of rap music, but also of Argentine tango and are being inspired.
The results are very suggestive. The contrast between the green of nature and the figures sprayed in very strong colours, “splits”. The Street Levels Gallery is the first contemporary urban art gallery that has collaborated on a stable basis since 2016 with creatives such as Exit Enter, Nian, Urto, Clet, Miles and Kraita317 and others. “It plays a fundamental role as a “buffer” of mediation between the different artistic visions and the needs of private individuals, public administrations and the community.
To date, the gallery boasts a long series of collaborations with municipalities, festivals, art exhibitions, museums, companies, public and private institutions, to spread and promote the Urban Art movement in Italy and around the world”. Called by the municipality to enrich the new garden, the gallery also compared itself with the creativity of other street artists not belonging to its own “stable” in a climate of sharing and exchange.
