THE MAREMMA PARK
The Maremma Park is a vast, green and unpolluted area with 9800 hectares of thick Mediterranean scrub. It is situated between the Uccellina mountains and the beaches of the coastline that goes from Principina to Talamone. The Park – apart 3from preserving the intact, historical memory of places like San Rabano from where you can even see the sea – is covered by large marshy areas near the River Ombrone's estuary. It is only by visiting these places that you can fully have an idea of the wild and fierce fascination of the Maremma area before it was drained out many years ago.
There are many wild animals to be seen here: wild boars, roe deers, fallow deers, herons and an abundance of foxes, that you will be able to take photos of, even close up.
It is here that the famous Maremma cow is born and bred, according to slow food principles, and is still breeding out in the wild, untamed, while looked after by the horse-riding cowherds, the 'butteri'.
Then there is the beach, a silver strip of sand washed by the crystalline sea water; it incarnates, with its profound beauty, the ideal place for those who dream and have always dreamed of, a place overlooking the wild sea and in the midst of nature, far from the chaos of the overcrowded, busy beaches and where it is able to create – to those who are lucky enough to visit it – the delight of a fairy tale atmosphere, the likes of which you can find nowhere else.
THE TAROT GARDEN
Following the inspiration she had during a visit to Antoni Gaudí's Parque Guell in Barcelona, then strengthened by a visit to the Bomarzo garden, Niki de Saint Phalle began building the Tarot Garden in 1979, on half a hectare of land covered in Mediterranean scrub on the hill of Garavicchio near Capalbio, in Maremma.
Identifying in the Garden the magical and spiritual dream of her life, Niki de Saint Phalle devoted herself to the construction of the twenty-two imposing figures in steel and concrete covered with glass, mirrors and colored ceramics for more than seventeen years, flanked by a team of names famous in contemporary art and above all by her husband Jean Tinguely, who died in 1991, who created the metal structures of the enormous sculptures and integrated some of them with his mécaniques, self-propelled assemblages of mechanical elements in iron.
Completed only in the summer of 1996, the creation of the Garden involved an enormous work of planting, in 1997 Niki de Saint Phalle established the Foundation Il Giardino dei Tarocchi whose purpose is to preserve and maintain the work created. On May 15, 1998, the Tarot Garden was opened to the public.
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