At one point, while discussing the period from the second half of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s, I mentioned Turin, and David smiled, pronouncing the number 127 in perfect Italian (centoventisette). He was referring to the kilometres that separate the Piedmontese capital from Milan airport: “I’ll never forget them”, he said, having travelled that route many times by car. “At the time, we all passed through Turin. There was a great artistic ferment in progress and the city was home to enlightened gallery owners like Pistoi”. Between exhibitions, performances and events, what would go on to become the most important vanguard of the second half of the 20^th century and would remain the only great Italian movement of international significance was developing: its name was Arte Povera.

It was in that Turin that I was born, raised and spent my teenage years. I was a kid, and, like all kids, my interests lay elsewhere, but growing up in a family that collected artworks by Giovanni Anselmo, Gilberto Zorio and Alighiero Boetti, seeing Giulio Paolini in our house preparing strange works and then breaking them as soon as they were finished, breathing in that energy, that vitality, I think it forged me and passed on that passion for art, which matured many years later.

The term Arte Povera was coined by art critic Germano Celant, the theorist of the movement, who used it for the first time in the essay Arte povera, appunti per una guerriglia, published in 1967 by the magazine Flash Art No. 5 and considered the manifesto of the movement. For Celant the term “povero” (Italian for poor) referred to the materials used by the artists and the movement’s intention to impoverish the artwork, taking an opposing stance to traditional art while simultaneously developing an essential language better suited to the contemporary world. If the first and historic exhibition Arte Povera-Im Spazio was held in 1967 at the La Bertesca gallery in Genoa, the real cradle of the movement was Turin, in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks mainly to Gian Enzo Sperone who, together with the group of Poveristi that he represented, stole the show from the old galleries. Promoting works that moved in a different direction to the dominant trend, he created a new axis linking Turin with Paris and New York, with the support of his friends Ileana and Michael Sonnabend and Leo Castelli.

It is very sad that the younger generation was unable to breathe the air of that Turin. I did not meet Gian Enzo until thirty years later and I have a few memories of Luciano Pistoi, a supremely elegant man. In 1958, Pistoi founded the Galleria Notizie, which became the training ground for this new generation of artists and militant critics, including Carla Lonzi and Enrico Crispolti. I never met Margherita Stein (better known as Christian Stein), the patron and gallery owner who used to gather his family of artists in the house-gallery in Piazza San Carlo where, every evening at 6 p.m., they would discuss art, theatre, literature and life. I never frequented Mario Tazzoli’s La Galatea and Remo Pastori’s Il Punto galleries, which hosted Pistoletto and Paolini’s first exhibitions. I like to imagine that there was a healthy competition between them, fuelled by ideals shared with galleries in Milan (Dell’Ariete and Del Naviglio), Genoa (La Bertesca), Bologna (De’ Foscherari) and Rome (La Tartaruga, La Salita and L’Attico), to which I would add Konrad Fisher in Düsseldorf and Sonnabend in Paris, which were also united in promoting the movement. I never got to meet most of that group of artists, great masters who are now over 80 years old, who formed the Arte Povera movement. I didn’t attend the debates, exhibitions, concerts or cineforums centred on the avant-garde and the new cultural trends that inspired the Unione Culturale of Turin, founded in the rooms of the Einaudi publishing house by a group of anti-fascist intellectuals. I didn’t experience the book presentations and frequent cultural events at the Luxemburg bookstore, the oldest in the city, which exuded an international air. I was unable to enjoy all of this because I was a child, but over the years I have had the opportunity to build up an accurate, if perhaps slightly fictionalised, picture thanks to the many testimonies and readings that have succeeded in conjuring up an almost vivid memory that I don’t possess.

In the 1990s, right after high school, I moved to the United States to study economics in San Francisco and San Diego. I then chose to settle in London, also spending time in the US and long periods in Paris over the next decade. That was when I began visiting a few museums of my own free will, for the first time without being “forced to attend”!

MoMA, Guggenheim, Whitney, Tate and Pompidou: exploring the work of the abstract expressionists of the New York School –Action Painting- (Williem De Koonig, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko), that of the later avant-gardes such as Pop (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Jones, Andy Warhol), Minimal (Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre) and the great masters in general, I realised that I felt a certain attraction -I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it was a passion at the time- for the contemporary that is now somewhat simplistically defined as Post War + Contemporary.

In those years, the masters of Arte Povera had already been cleared through customs by the great European and American museums, thanks to the pioneering work of Gian Enzo Sperone, Germano Celant and a handful of other insiders. Pistoletto, Kounellis, Paolini and the other Poveristi achieved international acclaim and had reacted to the hegemony of Pop Art. Over the years, museum-collections such as the Margulies (founded in Miami in the late 1990s), Castello di Rivoli (2000) and Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring (2017) would be dedicated to this movement, until the consecration in 2024, when the Pinault Collection presented at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris the largest Arte Povera exhibition ever held. In the United States, I often found myself looking at works that had made the same journey as me, whose history, or part of it, I knew. I had never studied them in depth, but somehow I understood their language. Memories, anecdotes, words I had heard but never really listened to as a child would surface. I would rework everything with an interest and passion that was becoming something serious. Yet never would I have imagined that one day I would find myself managing an immense estate that, with unique and museum works, represents all the leading figures in this splendid conceptual movement; I would have smiled if I had been told that this book, featuring works that I love deeply, would be the fifth volume dedicated to the Cecchi Trust Collection.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giulio Paolini, Giovanni Anselmo, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Mario and Marisa Merz, Alighiero Boetti, Giuseppe Penone, Gilberto Zorio, Jannis Kounellis, Pino Pascali, Luciano Fabro, Mario Ceroli, Gianni Piacentino, Emilio Prini and Piero Gilardi: Arte Povera e dintorni brings together 27 masterpieces by these masters who, using materials such as earth, stone, wood, glass and iron, restored an essential dimension to art in an intimate exchange with nature and the surrounding environment. Alongside them, I have chosen to include five artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Richard Long, Giorgio Griffa, Marco Gastini, and Maurizio Nannucci, who worked and produced while staying “close to” the movement, without formally joining it.

I could write a novel detailing the anecdotes and coincidences that accompanied the entry of each of the works into the collection. Starting with Kounellis’s Bilancine, perhaps the most striking piece in the catalogue, a 6 by 3 metre masterpiece composed of 63 iron scales and 63 pieces of Murano glass. I saw it for the first time in 2006 at the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, instantly falling in love with it, and found it a few years later in the exhibition spaces of gallery owner and dear friend Annamaria Maggi. A coincidence? Those who don’t believe in coincidences miss them. I didn’t miss it. I could continue with the works by Pistoletto and Ceroli, the subject of gruelling negotiations, and that of Gilardi with which, unfortunately, I set a new world record for the artist at auction, but I cannot reveal all my secrets to you.

I can tell you one more thing though: creating an art collection like this is a very complicated exercise, especially when you become part of the elite of major international collections. It’s not just a matter of having the time, resources, skills and sensitivity to build a coherent narrative. What truly makes the difference is the desire to safeguard and convey the message of a movement that developed in a corner of the world to which I am intimately bound.

Stefano Cecchi

“Stefano in his hometown, Turin, which becomes an international place through art, has illustrious predecessors: the legendary Riccardo Gualino, the highly secretive F.F. Cerruti, the incomparable Giovanni and Marella Agnelli and the extraordinary collections of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna (which owns one of the most important Warhols) and the Castello di Rivoli. It is on this sea that the Cecchi Collection sails.”

Marco Voena

“Collecting art is like venturing out into the ocean with a small boat equipped with just a few instruments for defence and control, yet the North Star (of art) is there to guide us. As far as I know, Stefano, your previous experiences had already in some way heralded a contiguity of art.”

Gian Enzo Sperone

Stefano Cecchi presented the contemporary art collection Stefano Cecchi Trust Collection in 2019. Arte Povera e dintorni is the fifth publication by SCTC, following the two general catalogues FP1 (2021), FP2 (2022), Transavanguardia Enchanted (2023) and Forma 1 (2024). He has been writing a column in the Giornale dell’Arte under a pseudonym since 2023.