We look forward to welcoming you to the Palazzo Corboli Museum for a new series of “Appointment at the Museum”: encounters with Art and Culture!

Saturday 8th november

PROGRAM:

Official Greetings: Enrica Ercoli, Councillor for Culture, Municipality of Asciano

Introduction: Stefano Tesi, Journalist and President of DMO Lauretana ETS “The Crete Senesi: Literature and Landscape”

Presentation of the novel: “Il Campo di Gosto” by Anna Luisa Pignatelli.
Interview with the author conducted by Elisa Rubegni, Director of the Asciano Museums, and Francesco Brogi, Researcher and Vice President of the Association for Cultural Research in Asciano (A.R.C.A.), with a contribution by Professor and author Fabio Pellegrini.

Followed by a farewell cocktail.

 Anna Luisa Pignatelli, born in Tuscany, has spent many years outside Italy, including several in Tanzania, Portugal, South Korea, and Guatemala. She is well known in France, where in 2010 she won the Prix des lecteurs de Var with the translation of her short story collection Nero Toscano. With Ruggine, published by Fazi Editore in 2026, highly praised by both the public and critics, she won the Premio Lugnano 2016. Also for Fazi Editore, in 2019, she published Foschia.

"Il campo di Gosto" is a tense story that plays on the contrast between the sunlit Tuscan landscapes and the inner shadows of its protagonist.

A writer with a strong and unmistakable voice, the author offers readers a bitter yet profound tale that, through brief memories, traces the existential arc of a man, while reflecting on the inequities and cruelties of the world. Gosto is an old, lonely man, caught between the inhospitable place he lives in and the malice of his fellow villagers, yet he is also the portrait of someone who has never lost faith in others and has preserved his love for life intact.

With a concise and clear prose, the author fits into a well-established tradition, doing so with her own distinctive style which, as Antonio Tabucchi noted, makes her "an unusual voice in today’s Italian literature: lyrical, sharp, and desolate."

Free event.

Where: Palazzo Corboli Museum, C.so G. Matteotti 122, Asciano, Siena

4:00 PM

Event organized in co-operation with the M. Monicelli Municipal Library of Asciano.

Sunday 16th November

PROGRAM

Institutional Greetings
Enrica Ercoli – Councillor for Culture, Municipality of Asciano
Elisa Rubegni – Director, Asciano Museums

Meeting with Medieval Historian
Maria Ginatempo
University of Siena – University of Malaga

The Landscape of the Crete Senesi from the Late Middle Ages to the Contemporary Age. The State of Research between History, Geography, and Archaeology.

Moderator: Francesco Brogi, Archaeologist

4:00 PM

The author offers a long-term synthesis of the environmental history of the complex and extensive territory of the Crete Senesi, drawing on an exceptionally rich body of studies—both recent and older—of historical (based mainly on written and also iconographic sources), geographical, and archaeological character. These studies are remarkable for their depth and scope, covering the late Middle Ages, the modern era, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The crucial issue here is, of course, the severe processes of erosion and desertification that the area has experienced and continues to experience—standing in sharp contrast to the regions of the so-called “beautiful Tuscan” and Umbrian landscapes—despite the development in much of the area of a variant of the sharecropping system known as “extensive mezzadria.”

Using a regressive method, moving from the present to the recent past and then to more distant times, down to the Late Middle Ages, the study seeks to reconstruct the transformations in the landscape and land use, and above all to determine when these processes began and what their causes were. The drastic depopulation beginning in the fourteenth century appears to have been a decisive factor, together with a clear agro-pastoral orientation on lands that had already been heavily deforested in previous centuries.

Free events.

Information: +39 0577 714450 | palazzocorboli@museisenesi.org