Villa Celle's Gori Collection Adds Serra dei Poeti Installation

The Gori Collection at Villa Celle in Pistoia, Italy, has expanded with its 80th installation: the Serra dei Poeti (Poets' Greenhouse), a collaborative work by landscape architect Andrea Mati and writer Sandro Veronesi. The project originated after a March 2015 windstorm felled hundreds of trees on the estate. Mati proposed planting thirty Bolgheri cypresses, each named after a poet from Manzoni to Cavalcanti to Quasimodo, forming the Focus. This leads to Veronesi's steel-and-glass greenhouse, shaped as a hyperbolic paraboloid, housing aromatic and ornamental plants celebrated by poets. The Serra dei Poeti honors the Gori family's long-standing appreciation for poetry, dating back to the 1950s when poets like Salvatore Quasimodo, Ettore Sanguineti, and Eugenio Montale frequented their Prato home. It also connects to the villa's history: Giuliano Gori was inspired by the early 19th-century aviary built by Bartolomeo Sestini, a poet and patriot who studied architecture to please his father. Gori saw in the aviary a model for interdisciplinary dialogue, which the new installation continues.