AUDIO DESCRIPTION OF THE WALK

DESCRIPTION OF THE PATH

The Alfredo Catarsini Foundation 1899 ETS has created this Path to make the artist known by inviting everyone to visit these wonderful lands, walking the streets and stopping in the places where Catarsini’s story began and where he drew inspiration for his extraordinary artistic and literary production. The partnership between the Catarsini Foundation and the Italian Touring Club aims to discover a creative migration between the artist and his places. A palindrome story of beauty, from the deep brushstroke of the Master to the impetuous and sweet nature of Versilia, where one gives to the other and vice versa. It is like walking accompanied by a constant presence of magic and emotion, as if the artist were suggesting things to us. Eleven totems positioned in the places where the works are exhibited tell with news and curiosities the magical atmosphere that can still be felt here today, the history of this territory and the beauty of its landscape, the natural and human environment in which he lived throughout the twentieth century and that he revealed to Italy and the entire world. Catarsini portrayed the dramas, hopes and tumultuous changes of this century, through an art and a poetry that changes while always remaining itself. And so, by versifying together along the path of his soul, in solitude and silence as well as in the noise of the crowd, we can better understand his motto “the world goes, my art arrives”.

The Path The Places of Catarsini – Paths

If we imagine looking from the peaks of the Apuan Alps at the Path The Places of Catarsini, we see paths that cross a territory that extends from the mountains to the sea, with villages and countryside and an incredibly varied landscape that encompasses the heart of Versilia, the land that the painter crossed and loved, making it loved through his art.

From Viareggio, as if at the center of a compass rose, Catarsini crossed a good part of the twentieth century, experiencing its profound artistic and historical transformations. The traces can be observed by walking the roads he traveled, visiting the places that preserve his memories and that record the changes in style as well as the great historical changes of a century as short as it was dramatic.

Drawing an ideal quadrilateral, the south-eastern vertex features the walls of Lucca, the city where he studied, with its splendid architecture and its Palazzo Orsetti, a stop on the Walk, where 5 significant works of the journey and poetics of Catarsini’s art are exhibited, compositions created between the 1950s and 1970s, decades marked by figurative experimentation that led him to develop two original pictorial languages: Reflexism and Mechanical Symbolism. An Experiential Laboratory for people with visual disabilities is set up here with a work that can be explored tactilely.

Further north, going up from Lucca along the Freddana valley, we see the church of San Tommaso a Castagnori, which preserves Catarsini’s frescoes painted in 1945 after the end of the conflict and those created the year before in the parish church of San Martino, a hamlet of Pescaglia, during the tragic evacuation of the inhabitants of Versilia. The bloody events of these years inspired the novel Giorni neri that Catarsini wrote after the conflict, based on notes and drawings of the period.

The preparatory drawings for these splendid frescoes can be admired in the Town Hall of Camaiore while in the nearby Museum of Sacred Art the delightful Madonnina delle darsene is exhibited, where the face of the Madonna is the portrait of his daughter Mity, which ideally takes us back to Viareggio, to the canals and shipyards that the painter loved since adolescence and that he painted continuously throughout his life.

Another preparatory cartoon for the frescoes of San Martino belongs to the collection of the Banca Versilia, Lunigiana and Garfagnana of Pietrasanta, in whose exhibition venue other graphic works are on display that portray his classroom of Life Drawing and the portrait of a student of the Istituto Stagio Stagi, where Catarsini taught from 1951 to 1968, also undertaking a parallel and fruitful activity as a writer and illustrator for La Nazione and for important periodicals, such as Viareggio Ieri and Versilia Oggi, published by Giorgio Giannelli.

From Pietrasanta we enter the upper Versilia up to Seravezza and its Villa Medicea, a UNESCO heritage site, where the stage hosts a splendid painting of the marble quarries of the Apuan Alps. From Seravezza and going towards the coast, at the north-western edge of the quadrilateral, there is Forte dei Marmi, where Catarsini exhibited several times, frequenting the Caffè del Quarto Platano, a famous place of conviviality and meeting place for intellectuals and artists who frequented Versilia, such as Soffici, Carrà and Nomellini. Many of these were his good friends, such as Enrico Pea, tutelary deity of the place, Leonida Rèpaci, founder of the Viareggio Prize and the great sculptor Arturo Dazzi.

Catarsini executed caricature portraits of them, including himself, now exhibited at Villa Bertelli in the Quarto Platano Museum together with ll grano della bonifica lucchese, the large painting exhibited at the 1940 Cremona Prize which recently had great success at the Vittoriale degli Italiani and at the MART in Rovereto.

From Forte dei Marmi, along the golden strip of the coast, you reach the two intermediate stops: La Versiliana of Marina di Pietrasanta and Lido di Camaiore. From the three piers that characterize the three locations you can appreciate the panorama of the Apuan Alps. The two intermediate stops are indicated by totems.

As you proceed south, you can see the profile of the Viareggio pier to the south, which juts out into the blue sea. Here the painter was born, in the shadow of the Matilde Tower and here he had his studio, in a turret of what is now the Villa Museo Paolina Bonaparte, with the archive that holds significant documents and memories of his activity and some works representative of that research that, from the colors and silence of the dock, through the noise of the busy shipyards, arrives at imagining the disturbing symbols of a surreal mechanized civilization.

In the Palazzo delle Muse, instead, the works of the donation of his children to the Municipality of Viareggio are on display, which well represent the evolution of his artistic and poetic exploration, begun under the auspices of Lorenzo Viani, portrayed in one of the works exhibited, to whom he was linked by a deep relationship of esteem and friendship.

Behind Viareggio you reach Villa La Brilla in Massarosa, where you can see three of his landscapes that are particularly emblematic of how well-known and dear that area was to the painter, who often portrayed it, painting solitary and silent views of Lake Massaciuccoli and the surrounding countryside. This was the road that he frequently took to reach Lucca, from where we can still set off today. All entrances are free and accessible.

THESE ARE THE THREE ROUTES THAT CAN BE DONE ON FOOT, BY BICYCLE, BY MOTORBIKE AND BY CAR.

THE RAILWAY STATIONS ARE IN LUCCA, PIETRASANTA, FORTE DEI MARMI/QUERCETA, CAPEZZANO PIANORE, VIAREGGIO AND MASSAROSA

Large ring – Complete and Versilia route – from Lucca to Lucca through Val Freddana, Camaiore, Pietrasanta, Seravezza, Forte dei Marmi, Viareggio and Massarosa –

Route statistics

Distance 101.03 km

Positive elevation gain 789 m

Technical difficulty Medium

Link: https://it.wikiloc.com/percorsi-auto/il-camino-completo-e-delle-versilie-200782167

Short ring ” – Complete and Versilia route – from Lucca to Lucca through Val Freddana, Camaiore, Viareggio and Massarosa

Route statistics

Distance 76.22 km

Positive elevation gain 657 m

Difficulty technique Medium

Link:  https://it.wikiloc.com/percorsi-auto/il-cammino-della-lucchesia-e-della-marina-173790002

Short loop – Cammino degli affreschi e dei panorami – from Lucca to Lucca through Val Freddana and Massarosa

Trail statistics

Distance 52.45 km

Positive elevation gain 661 m

Technical difficulty Easy

Link:    https://it.wikiloc.com/percorsi-auto/il-cammino-degli-affreschi-e-dei-panorami-173778878

THE RAILWAY STATIONS ARE IN:

LUCCA, PIETRASANTA, QUERCETA, FORTE DEI MARMI,

CAPEZZANO PIANORE, VIAREGGIO AND MASSAROSA/BOZZANO