.jpg)
THE GARDEN PROJECT: SUMMER 2026. ELENA SALVINI PIERALLINI: Book Art… and Other Gardens
- May 8
- 7 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Exhibitions, performances, lectures and a community art event on Elena Salvini Pierallini's book art, in venues with a history for women's achievement
Throughout her more than sixty-year career, Tuscan artist Elena Salvini Pierallini (1934–2024) produced an eclectic oeuvre largely comprised of embroidery, photography and book art. Monographic and pop-up exhibitions featuring the artist’s work are planned in several Florentine venues this summer, in addition to dance performances, lectures and a community art event for contemporary artists and the public at large. This programme calendar forms part of ‘The Garden Project’, a three-year cultural programme that began in 2024, organised by Il Palmerino Cultural Association and Calliope Arts Foundation, in collaboration with the British Institute of Florence. To participate, write to associazione@palmerino.it
Join us for the exhibition Elena Salvini Pierallini: Book Art and Other Gardens at Il Palmerino Cultural Association (June 12 to September 30, 2026). In response to the show’s opening, the Florence State Archives will be hosting a series of short lectures and a pop-up show of ESP’s works (June 16 to June 19). The following week, we’ll meet ‘up at the villa’ for site-specific outdoor dance performances at New York University’s Villa La Pietra (June 29), and Medici Villa La Quiete (July 2), which shine a spotlight on the history of women in these garden venues. At the end of summer (TBA), we’ll be back in town at MAD – Le Murate Art District, for a show-and-tell community art event, featuring seven contemporary artists tasked with completing seven art books, from the Borse Nere series that Elena Salvini Pierallini left unfinished.
Elena Salvini Pierallini: Book Art and Other Gardens will be featured in Issue 9 of The Curators’ Quaderno, produced by Calliope Arts Foundation, in collaboration with The Florentine, available on site at all events, and, for free, via post, to the magazine’s subscribers.
Monographic art exhibition
Elena Salvini Pierallini: Other Gardens
13 June to 23 September 2026
Inauguration: 12 June, from 6pm
To reserve your place: associazione@palmerino.it
Cultural Association Il Palmerino
Via Il Palmerino 6, Florence
Opening times: From 4pm to 7pm, Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays
From 10 am to 1 pm on Sundays
For the whole of the summer, Cultural Association Il Palmerino will be hosting a monographic exhibition featuring Tuscan artist Elena Salvini Pierallini. Art Books and Other Gardens is co-curated by Giovanna Giusti, formerly a curator at the Uffizi Galleries, and the artist’s daughters Beatrice and Sibilla Pierallini. Elena Salvini Pierallini’s ‘professional’ endeavours as an artist began when ESP was sixteen, and involved drawing embroidery patterns for her mother, who produced fine tableware. It did not take long for ESP to decide that she wanted to produce embroidery works with no ‘utilitarian purpose’, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she drew from medieval symbols and courtly or country scenes, developing a two-layer method of production, which involved painting on silk (underneath) and embroidery on organza (as a top layer). In the early 1980s, ESP set aside her more classic works of embroidery, and until the end of her life, focused on photography and book art. Using elements from nature (like shells and stones) and plastics or household objects (string and screens), she produced notable works including The Sun and the Moon and Eating Stones. Her photographs are often centred around natural objects or carefully assembled still-life shots in series, where Nature’s dynamic forms and phases are unapologetically pushed into the viewer’s gaze.
Issue 9 of The Curators’ Quaderno featuring the works by ESP will be available for partners and the public at all of the programme’s events. ESP’s book art, perhaps her most celebrated work, combines the artist’s original photography, theme-based magazine cut-outs, and embroidered accents, added to give a sense of unity to a single work’s numerous images. For more than forty years, ESP produced more traditional ‘Books to Flip-through’ and her installation-like Libri in Piedi or Books on Their Feet. TCQ is a notebook-style publication whose aim is to spotlight the contributions of women in various disciplines: art, literature, science music and more.
Pop-up exhibition and inaugural lectures
Elena Salvini Pierallini and Marilena Mosco
15 June - Seminar event: 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Vistors can see the pop-up exhibition during the Archives' opening hours
from 16 June to 19 June 2026, from 9 am to 5pm
No reservations necessary
The Florence State Archive
Viale Giovine Italia 6, Florence
Visit Florence’s National State Archive for a one-week pop-up exhibition featuring Elena Salvini Pierallini’s book art, which is set to kick off with a multi-speaker lecture in the archive’s auditorium, organised in collaboration with the Archivio della Memoria e della Scrittura delle Donne A.C. Bonacossi (Archive for the Memory and Writings of Women). It will feature short presentations on artist Elena Salvini Pierallini that also recount the experience of Marilena Mosco, art historian and former curator at Palazzo Pitti. As two pioneering women in their respective fields, they were united by friendship and an irreverence for the ‘impossible’ that took the Florence art-and-culture scene by storm in the 1980s and 1990s. Among their common friends and colleagues who will speak at the event, expect top art historians including curator Giovanna Giusti, literary critic and author Ernestina Pellegrini, and professor and contemporary art historian Eliana Princi.
The Garden Project’s summer programme involves a student performance grant, aimed at the organisation of two performances, inspired by archival studies within the stores of two Florentine villas associated with women’s history, Villa La Quiete and Villa La Pietra.
Outdoor Dance Performance
Alii horti: From Books to the Garden Stage
29 June 2026, 7 pm to 8pm
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese 120, Florence
Reservations necessary. To reserve your place:
This dance performance at the Villa La Pietra Garden will end the NYU summer season, and be executed as a tribute to Hortensia Acton in a style mirroring garden performances of old. Hortensia Acton played a fundamental role as patron and organiser of a unique brand of theatre that developed in Tuscan villa settings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as the avant-garde performances of Isadora Duncan, the Ballets Russes, and the stylised beauty of the Deco Movement and the Peking Opera.
Outdoor Dance Performance
Alii horti: Gardens for Medici Women
2 July 2026, 7pm to 8pm
Villa La Quiete
via di Boldrone 2, Florence
Reservations necessary.
To reserve your place: associazione@palmerino.it
Di I, Sailko, CC, Wikipedia Commons, Villa La Pietra, Lemonary and Vines
Villa La Quiete was a ‘summer home’ and garden beloved and cared for by three generations of Medici women (Cristina di Lorena, Vittoria della Rovere and Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici). It was also a site that provided education opportunities for secular and religious women for centuries, including the Montalve congregation and their order’s founder Eleonora Ramirez de Montalvo (1602-1659). On July 2, its recently restored garden will host a dance performance that brings together the ‘voices’ of several generations of Medici women and focus on the garden as a spiritual and cultural ‘space of one’s own’. For the evening of the performance, audiences will have the opportunity to view an ‘installation’ of Elena Pierallini Salvini’s books, and exhibited photographs by Marco Badiani, in which ESP’s art stands in conversations with the villa and garden.
More on our Summer Performance Grants
First, under the guidance of Francesca Baldry, curator and archivist at the Villa La Pietra library, students will begin with the documents and photographs that emerged during the preparation of New York University Florence’s current exhibition, ‘Behind the Mask: Performance and Identity within the Acton Mitchell Family’, curated by Baldry herself, in an attempt to ‘pull back the curtain’ on the theatrical world of Villa La Pietra. Next, awardees will explore the archives and gardens of Villa La Quiete and its multi-century history as a centre of culture and spirituality for women. Performance awardees, led by professional choreographer Federica Parretti, include a group of student and professional dancers and musicians, such as Sofie Robinson, a Canadian dancer and choreographer from the University of Toronto, together with dance students affiliated with Il Palmerino, Margaret Dwyer and Alva Renspie from the University of Georgia. Professional dancer Camilla Recabarren Vilchez (Argentinean, currently based in Florence) and former dancer Celia Donoso Clemente, now assistant Collections Manager at NYU, will also support the student troupe. The troupe will also include young musicians tasked with creating an original music score inspired by historic women and their garden spaces (TBA) both recorded and performed live.
Community Art Event
‘Exploring the artist’s subconscious’
Contemporary artists and ESP
End of summer (TBA)
MAD – Murate Art District
Piazza Madonna della Neve 6, Florence
One of ESP’s most successful artistic endeavours was to mobilise Florence’s local art scene by creating community events in which artists could produce and share works in conversation. Her ‘Borse nere’, or ‘Black Bag Initiative’ lasted for more than ten editions. The premise was simple: she’d create incomplete ‘Books on Their Feet’, filling only half of each book with her own artwork. She tucked each of her art books in large black bags symbolising the subconscious, and gifted them to other artists, with an invitation to fill both bag and book with whatever suited their fancy. Later, these artists would gather at a monumental venue in Florence, in what she called a show-and-tell ‘performance’, which involved extracting their new-fangled art books and sources of inspiration, from the depths of their borse nere for discussion among their peers, but in public. With seven incomplete art books now part of the ESP Archive, Elena Salvini Pierallini’s daughters plan to gift the books to contemporary artists (TBA) to continue the art conversation their mother began decades ago. Public presentation by participating artists is scheduled for the end of summer 2026 (TBA) at MAD – Murate Art District, a former convent turned female prison, which became a contemporary art centre hosting major exhibitions as of 2011.
Comments