The fountains of Tonino Guerra
A “widespread” itinerary in Valmarecchia in the company of the Poet of the Fountains.
Tonino Guerra’s creativity is magical, his relationship with the land is powerful, his gaze has always been turned to the future but also to the past, to suspended projects and forgotten fruits.
And then there are the fountains, scattered in Valmarecchia, Montefeltro and on the Romagna Riviera, colourful, chatty, in motion.
They are all made of mosaic, ceramic, glass and wrought iron and are the signature that the poet left in several cities, including Riccione, Santarcangelo, Poggio Berni, Torriana, Sant’Agata Feltria and Pennabilli.
In this itinerary, Tonino Guerra’s fountains become the protagonists of a journey to discover some of the most beautiful points of the Rimini Riviera, a veritable treasure between the sea and the mountains where the fountains are the common thread in a harmonious mix of colour, movement and sound.
Let’s start from the sea, and precisely from Riccione, where the “Woods of the Rain” dominates Piazzale Roma, a fountain that is above all a tribute to the rain and the coolness that it brings in its wake. This work is also a reference to fishing and the sea, with six large columns of laminated natural glass holding seven fishing nets from which rain drips, producing a musical dripping sound.
“Drops of water that wet thoughts”, this is how the Poet defined them.
Santarcangelo is the city where Tonino Guerra was born and offers a vast and rich itinerary that testifies to his life and artistic genius.
From Piazza Ganganelli, where he lived, went to school and played as a child, wherever you go you will feel his poetic breath that has become concrete.
Let’s start right from Piazza Ganganelli where “The Pinecone Fountain” dominates, the first encounter with his concrete poems, that is, the installations born from his ideas, thoughts and drawings.
The fountain, built in 1989, was no longer in operation. It was renovated to a design by Tonino Guerra in the last months of his life, by the architect Claudio Lazzarini and Rita Ronconi. It involved inserting a pine cone in Istrian stone, a traditional symbol of hospitality, in the centre of the fountain.
The idea is part of Tonino Guerra’s Suspended Projects, fifty projects designed to beautify Valmarecchia and collected in a publication.
“Suspended projects are suggestions for embellishing a town, a city, a landscape. (…) the most important fact is that they are fixed in the memory of the people and especially of the young. (…) they are footprints that become a collective dream, now that all ideals have fallen and young people are walking dangerous roads”. Tonino Guerra
But other fountains await you in the city centre such as The Sunken Lawn and The Stone Flowers in the Campo della Fiera.
The Sunken Lawn is composed of a curvilinear body of water with a carpet of water jets in the centre where four glass sculptures by the artist Fausto Baldessarini are positioned; the Stone Flowers, on the other hand, are seven stone stems from which water descends, washing away the surface. In the background, the walls and the imposing Malatesta Fortress.
“It is a carpet of serenity and those who listen to it find a moment of meditation. It is as if what we have inside arrives on earth and thus pleasures and anxieties emerge. It is a mirror of the soul that makes you reflect on your thoughts and those who look at it find themselves.” This is how the Poet defined these works.
Just ten minutes by road from Santarcangelo you reach the cultivated hills of Poggio Berni, which in any season offer pleasant views.
Here in Piazza San Rocco there is the Fountain of Memory. Designed by Tonino Guerra, it represents a large marine fossil to remember those that were found in the Marecchia river. Made of Montefeltro stone, it also wants to remember the millstones of the many old mills that document the history of this area.
“We give water our immobility made up of memories”. Tonino Guerra
In Torriana, on the other hand, in Piazza S. Allende, terraced in the centre of the current village, we find The Tree of Water, the first fountain that the poet Tonino Guerra designed for his Valmarecchia to pay homage to the Marecchia river.
“This fountain wants to be a portrait of our river (Marecchia) which in summer removes its branches, among the stones, thus becoming the tree of water”. Tonino Guerra
This journey through Tonino Guerra’s Fountains reaches Sant’Agata Feltria and develops along the historic centre where we find a beautiful installation.
The Fountain of the Snail - also known as The Snail - carries with it the hallmarks of his poetics: the slowness and spirals of life. Decorated with mosaics, using three hundred thousand tiles, it is a small jewel lying on a staircase between Piazza Martiri d’Ungheria and the upper part of the village.
The last stop on this journey is Pennabilli, which deserves a special mention as the seat of the second Museum dedicated to Tonino Guerra. It is precisely here that the largest number of suspended projects conceived by the Master have been created in the Garden of Forgotten Fruits.
“The Voice of the Leaf” manifests itself as a fountain in which water, like lymph, gushes bubbling from a three-meter-high wooden leaf, to fall back on the circular stone of an old mill and be collected by white river stones.
Poetry within poetry, Tonino Guerra, wrote about this work: “In autumn, the sound of a falling leaf is deafening because a year falls with it”.