Rolando Stefanacci Artist.

Rolando Stefanacci was born at Vernio (Prato) on August 5th, 1931 and lived in the ville “Il Gabbiano” in Comune of Vaiano for several years. In 1993 he moved to Monteverdi Marittimo in the Municipality of Pisa and settled in the villa “Le Querciaiole” which he transformed into a large park-museum. Not flattered by the exhibition activity (which also gave him satisfaction and approval), Stefanacci made numerous sculptures and ceramics for the municipalities of Prato, Monghidoro, Agliana, Monteverdi and several other cities in Tuscany, for Germany and, recently, for the ‘Australia, with the project of a large fountain for a square in Sidney.

A sculptor who has chosen the alchemical path to interpret his works, germinated by the knowledge of esoteric philosophies and masters of life from all over the world.

…”la verità è come un grande albero, più viene curato e più da frutti; e più si scava nella miniera della verità, più vi scoprono le ricche gemme che vi sono sepolte”…
M. K. Ghandi

The Discovery of Painting

Love for Ceramics

A Choice of life

In the quiet of Monteverdi

The Metamorphosis

The Discovery of Painting

“When you come to knowledge comes physical death”.

It might seem like a big and subtly presumptuous sentence. It might sound a big and subtly conceited sentence. Rolando Stefanacci tells so in strong belief, as a man that has left materialism behind, to give himself up to spirituality.

It’s just clearly symbolic, in order to underline how his search, through esoteric studies and alchemy, later related to his sculptures of the last 20 years, is based on some beliefs come to surface and then exploded out of his alchemic, cabalistic/hermetic knowledge and of his reading of Egyptian hieroglyphics that put it on a mental dimension overcoming and even forgetting the traditional criteria of reality, to impose a strictly personal perspective, what himself calls “his own reality”.

A preface which will turn out necessary on coping with the analysis both of his life and of his artistic work, just because symbols, the essence of things, are the ground of his search, or better his
initiatory message. An alchemy that consists of transforming metals into gold, but that means fundamentally the transformation of man into pure spirit, and that also represents human evolution from a merely material condition to a spiritual one. Here lies the link to Stefanacci’s search, often so hermetic both in his expression and in the representation of his works that it sometimes disconcerts the viewer or whoever may want to analyse his message thoroughly or try to reach its most hidden meanings.
It is therefore necessary to stop and medidate long, especially on the small and big sculptures which have been or are travelling around the world, all deeply imbued with pregnant spirituality, where the alchemic process is just the path of his work,
never allegoric but always symbolic.(1) A remark that cannot ever be trivial because it helps stimulating a desire to come back to the ancient splendour of virtue, knowledge and wisdom in anybody who watches as well as in the one who analyses.

“Il nonno” (1985)

A long anticipation before going along Stefanacci’s path through the gradual growth of his being an artist, maybe conscious to be so since childhood, when he had artistic aspiratons that would bloom later.

Una veduta del cortile della villa “Il Gabbiano”

A place rich in historical traditions, where Rolando – seventh of eight brothers – stole the secrets of nature that surrounded him with an eye always attentive to the human material which will then be at the center of his interest, especially when his frantic search will be purified in some way from the aesthetic fact to privilege only interiority and spirituality through an alchemical methodology.

A symbolic graphic work from the early period

From a very young age, at school, he loved portraying the faces of his classmates, family members, who were his first discoveries and who perhaps at an unconscious level tempted him, precisely because in observing them he was already led more to investigate moods than not. outlines and facial features. Yes, this is an intuition of future research. In his childish mind he perhaps cherished the hope of becoming a painter when he grew up. But he had read somewhere that “he who lives on painting dies at the retired people’s home”, and thus the wish to to get the so called “position” prevailed somehow, and young Stefanacci devoted himself to work and dealt with the stuff that had made Prato’s fortune since the 16th Century; wool and its hundreds of elaborations, renamed all over the world so much to make Prato the “Tuscan Manchester” Thus his youth painting attempts were put aside for a long time.
Thus his youth painting attempts were put aside for a long time.

Ritratto di Mannini (1969)

But from the “Gull’s hill”, a rock over la Briglia, where his family had moved from Vernio, powerful came the call of the art which was inside him, and which urged him so much to drive him back to handle brushes and colours again. Many years had gone by, but what had been a youth gift hadn’t faded: in the early Sixties he had exhibited his works at Giorgi’s gallery in Florence for the first time, which had got his first review thanks to those Tuscan landscapes of melancholy and those faces carved by suffering, generally belonging to common people, and manners portraits and magnetic-eyed ladies.
Stefanacci admits to have been fascinated by the great masters of the past, Impressionists above all, from Degas to Manet, from Renoir to Toulouse-Lautrec, up to the greet ‘800 Neapolitons, on visiting French and Swiss museums. He had perceived in their strong colour contrasts, a subtle symbolism and, although by intuition, he had transferred it into his own works, driving Cecilia Toschi to write in a clear article on October 7 973 “Eco d’Arte” that “…an echo of this figurative world of ours remains in some works of the artist, though revised in more homogenous and relaxed emotions, leaving more space to colour details and chiaroscuro resonance…”; and then tell about on “the warm colours that the artist manages vigorously to exploit to his own advantage, by focusing with light touches the core of the work, the theme he cares the most….

La Rinascita (1960)

Stefanacci nearly hedges when he is asked to tell about the milestones of his life, especially the early ones, so far in the memory by now, and from today’s researches all aiming at more real targets.
“Why, would you make them better?” was the answer of his son. That was how it started again.
After his first exhibition, others followed even if Stefanacci never believed in fame through public proposition. Moreover – also stimulated by friends and admirers, he sent some of his paintings to the painting prizes (more for verification than anything else) and in ’68 he hit the mark in a competition dedicated to Vittorio De Sica in Rome in which three hundred Italian painters had participated, obtaining the first prize that was awarded to him during the “night of the oscars”. For this reason, it deserved to be published in the magazine “Arte mercato”, an international monthly of contemporary art. He was defined, in the motivation, “the painter of meditation and silence” and in his Tuscan landscapes “deep tones and contents, vibrant like musical notes that give the sensation of an intimate rhythmic language” were recognized.
Stefanacci is almost shy when he is asked to tell the stages of his life, especially the initial ones, now distant in memory and from current research all aimed at more concrete objectives. But this too belongs to a story, to a path, yet we can say that it’s just the ground of a wide range search such as Stefanacci’s has always been by a constant suffering, yesterday painting and ceramics, today sculpture born by the meanders of inner life, elicited by deep studies linked to the Real Art, that’s alchemy, nothing but a natural mirror of revealed truth, or psychical metamorphosis art.It’s a time,
the one between the Sixties and Seven ties, of great fruitfulness, even though Stefanacci doesn’t attend Galleries because he works almost exclusively for himself only. But it’s a work that doesn’t get over sighted: his “old people” with their carved faces where the suffering of an entire mankind seems to come to surface, filtered by their dramatic looks – on inquiring about human condition- are pointed out by critics, and Stefanacci gets listed in “Quadrato”where Wilson Domma writes that “…in his pictures a variant can be noticed necessary to increase the emotions that helps dramatize the subject, to suggest it again according to a new scale of more effective values…” And it’s also something that foreshadows a natural shift to sculpture by its plasticity due to Stefanacci’s inner disposition to give matter a shape.
In the meanwhile, already since the end of the Fifties, Stefanacci faces deep alchemic -philosophic studies by meeting masters of research from all over the world:
these studies, which modify his way of thinking partially, get mixed to his recovered artistic search and influence formal and content results heavily, both about oil paintings (abandoned later) and about graphics, ceramics and buildings as well as stone and bronze scuIpture. It’s a gradual upsetting of ideas that gets total gradually: its external, let’s say aesthetic feature, that has never played a main role, turns into symbolic meanings embodied by a deeper and deeper study of alchemy meant as a ‘godless’ knowledge-based mysticism.
1) “True symbolism implies that things different by time space, shape, and other circumstances, can shore the same being. “(T Burckhardt)

Love for Ceramics

“When you come to knowledge comes physical death”.

Il Gabbiano” primo rifugio di Stefanacci

“Il Gabbiano”, the villa on the Vaiano hills where his son lives now is flooded by the ceramics that Stefanacci has ” baked ” in the stove he has built in his garden. He has got to ceramics gradually, to experiment his research about other materials that might offer him the opportunity to express his own innermost emotions, maintaining however that “art doesn’t makes emotions but just awakens everybody’s hidden ones”. Such emotions have then found such a ground in his deep hermetic-mystic studies, parallel to his passion for initiatory doctrines (whose rituals he examines, whose meanings in turn can be often found in his works) that the traditional expressive rules of art get “upset”.
His points of reference along his search for truth are Ermete Trismegis to, Eraclio, Filatete and all those who have trodden the path of knowledge. He is so involved in his studies that he calls his stove “Athanor” (2) and often talks by enigmas. Right as enigmas are these ce ramics of his, made lively by brilliant colours, by often swollen shapes that nevertheless have always got a hid den meaning ofRolando Stefanacci foto 10 their own among the folds of an idea that comes from such far-fetched meanings as if they were taken from the Emeraldine Table by Ermete-Thot. (3)

(3) “The esthetical contents of a work -Stefanacci says- can be judged or interpreted, but the message of the symbol is not to be discussed about, because it’s perfect: you know it or you don’t”. In the deep belief about this Stefanacci neglects finishing touches and proportion rules and cares more about con tents through essential symbolism.
He is so much a master of the material of the new technique that Leonetto Tintori, one of the most named artists in restoration, frescoes and a hundred other things’ technique, beside being the Founder of Vainella School at Figline of Prato where students from all over the world are taught all techniques, promotes him consultant, entrusts him with tasks and works with him on some projects.
Right photo Stefanacci with Leonetto Tintori (al centro)
Tintori’s judgement on this artist who tries to unlock the knowledge of his works by a symbolic reading key is important “because in his works he works out his own man’s and artist’s torment by transfiguring everyday reality, even the simplest one, into symbols. Stefanacci opens a new one in the old cinema in Figline, next to Vainella School. He will keep it From ’87 to ’93, until he moves elsewhere.
Leonetto Tintori has already got an international name and when he has to accomplish a public work in Comune of Monghidoro, Bologna, he calls Stefanacci to help him: the former makes some ceramics picturing ‘the village, the latter, a 3 meter tall image of a man immerged in nature, among animals and vegetation. And the same Comune of Monghidoro entrusts him with the making of a big piece of ceramics decorating the front of the Alpini’s Mausoleum.
In the photo on the right the work created for the municipality of Monghidoro.
The ceramic pictures the climbing of a group of Alpini that, with the help of the mules, are carrying tools and food. Inside he makes another piece of ceramics where some Alpini are drinking wine from a barrel to celebrate the rest they have deserved. The year after, together with Leonetto Tintori again, he decorates with some ceramics the swimming pool of Iolo, Provincia of Prato. His staying in Figline drives him later to decorate with his ceramics the inside of Pubblica Assistenza’s Building, where he builds up a piece of ceramics picturing the Big Father blessing two men handshaking (which is the symbol of the above mentioned association ) over a scene of men drawing carts, once used as rudimentary ambulances, surrounded by a crowd of people come to praise the commitment of such a pitiful action. Then some ceramics situated inside Misericordia Association’s Building, picturing Partisans’ sacrifice (4); and finally a piece of ceramics picturing a young boy busy with study in the Primary School’s building. Stimulated by these activities he puts a ceramic suggesting a sport path in the building of AVIS, via Ciliani , Prato, beside several ceramics in the schools of via Galilei, Prato.
In the photo on the right the installation of ceramics in Monghidoro
Stefanacci is shy about making himself known, but orders come all the same. His first truly symbolic works, which will even stimulate arguments, are those made for Comune of Agliana, Provincia of Pistoia. He has to decorate the chapel of the new cemetery and Stefanacci is asked to do so (and he will disinterestedly, as usual: “I haven’t given this work owing to a vain search of glory – he says – on the contrary to leave a footmark, a message to those who come after me…”) beside leaving some more works in the Comune’s hall, under the loggia outside the village’s technical school.

“La caduta del gallo”

In the photo on the right Stefanacci with the deputy mayor Benelli in Figline
In the photo on the right The chapel of the cemetery of AglianaThe great ceramic in the chapel is defined as a message of hope, a decoration that consists in the serene vision of human life, from beginning to end. Here is how Professor Antonio Pagni ,interprets it, after a long talk with the artist: “…in the middle of the chapel’s fronton, on a red brick background a big egg lies, the symbol of any beginning of life; from the white uncovered cell a newborn man comes out. On the right inside wall a slender Eve stands and scatters human beings on the Earth, with natural prolificity. In front of Eve, on the left wall, Abraham walks solemnly with a step made steady by the promise of justice he is entrusted with. Behind the altar, on the front wall, the sunset of life, in the shadow of the sacrificial wood. The Dead’s spirit hovers about in the valley and aspires to rejoin the bright universe. On the entrance wall a Pelican, a symbol of love and sacrifice, closes a path characterized by bright tones and shines.
Thus, even in the place bound to the suffering contemplation of death, Rolando talks about life through the symbols of a Nature purified by love, in its upward move towards the spirit of the Father that, in the chapel’s sky, watches over and waits. ”The school’s kids too, in an article on their school paper, entitled ” Thanks Rolando ” try interpreting these symbols which however hold a message addressed to the young.
In the photo on the right The detail of Stefanacci’s ceramics
And Tintori again, in the attempt to explain Stefanacci ‘s artistic vocation, says that ” the artist soothes by love his bitterness about the unhappy existence of man in search of the mysterious reason of life, in a strain meant to understand and communicate. In a simple elegant plastic interpretation, he transfigures any simplest everyday reality into meaningful symbols. The lively images sprung from his intense, deep meditation surface, lit up by a rarefied light. And to those who ask the artist from Prato about which joy this work can give him, he replies that “The creation of a work of art makes easy to me the separation from the material dimension and the shift to the astral one, to animity”
IIn the meanwhile in the Comune’s hall, in a 3 meter high piece of ceramics, he draws the tall picture of a young man as the symbol of Comune of Agliana (young as far as its recent history, although of rural and Middle Ages origin) that holds a scale, Justice, and a dove, Peace, in his hands. Under the loggia of Capitini School he carries out a work where a boy is pictured, whose feet are set on the Earth’s sheet, where biblical scenes are visible, from Cain and Abel’s fight told about in the Genesis, and in other zones there are scenes to be interpreted differently by the public.
In the photo on the right The restoration of the Verzoni-Bizzocchi Palace
Here is therefore the depth of Stefanacci’s research, who invites the public to solve enigmas on which his philosophic and esoteric studies are based.
The closeness to Leonetto Tintori drives him to carry out some restoration works too: the former in 1989 at Villa Azalee of Florence where the ceiling was nearly about to give way: Stefanacci intervenes with a substantial work of consolidation and restoration of the marvellous frescoes of the vault. The year after Palazzo Verzoni Bizzocchi – the seat of Unione Commercianti, via S.Trinita, Prato needs his work. It’s an allegoric fresco ascribed to painter Stefano Catani from Prato. It is an allegorical fresco attributed to the outstretched painter Stefano Catani. Stefanacci sets to closing the cracks on the surface first, eliminated by ‘injections’ of cement and substances specifically prepared for conservation. He then restores the lower part of the painting that had already come off at the end of the XIX th century; then he retouches figures and stuccoes. A model restoration work during which Stefanacci has used the painting techniques of the time by making use of even eighty different colours.
His name has already gone over the boundary of Italy and actually a task comes to him from Germany in ’92: he is asked to decorate the Hotel Lindenv art, Erfurt with his ceramics. A job that keeps Stefanacci busy for a long time. At the entrance he puts 2 ceramics picturing a female and a male image as symbols of opposed polarity: in the inner hall some other ceramics picturing old age wisdom, a female figure mixing up waters, an old man standing with the help of his stick (5) and a man busy working with Nature.
In the photo on the right The intervention in the Hotel Lindervat in Germany
In the meanwhile Stefanacci lives in symbiosis with his works invading the inside as well as the outside of his villa “II Gabbiano”: fountains have become sculptures, wrought out stones evoking mysterious figures outcrop the geometrical shapes of the orchard and of the garden. Stefanacci has in fact met stone and bronze after ceramics and continues to work this material.
The great pottery for the Misericordia of Figline
“Il viandante” (ceramica)

They are new expressive techniques that will walk aside ceramics, mixing them sleves up with it to give borth to something homogenous where Stefanacci unchains his imagination, which never oversights the implied meanings of his deep knowledge of western philiosophies, of Martinism, of catholic studies, of exorcism, of the meetings with Tibetan Lamas and with the Masters of Knowledge from several countries and the reading of Egyptian hieroglyphics that he says have “opened to me the doors of my inner life”.
“Do know, stay unknown”; this sentence, carved on a piece of ceramics on a wall of the villa Il Gabbiano, is a sort of warning about Stefanacci’s reservedness that will have to yield necessarily owing to the subsequent decisions of the artist, who builds up a sort of personal museum that does’ nt allow him to hide or rather to withdraw in ton himself any longer, in a world where he only exists, facing infinite’s mysteries to find in it the signs able to drive him on the path leading to knowledge.

NOTE
2)From the Arabian ‘At-tauner’, the name the alchemists give to the furnace where they get their elixirs prepared.
(3) The three-times-powerful Ermete, who is the Aegyptian God Thoth
(4)In the days before the town liberation from German and fascist troops, twenty nine partisans were hanged in the village: the ceramic aims to exalt their memory.
(5) (5) The figure of the old man is recurrent in his sculptures: The model of these images – Stefanacci says – “is an old man I met a long time ago on the Calvana hills over Prato, a surly and wild being that was over 80 and had always lived amid the woods. His attitude and his penetrating look

A Choice of life

In the photo on the left Stefanacci at work
1993 is an important year in Stefanacci’s life: it is the year in which the artist makes a decision destined in some way to give a different course to his existence: the total abandonment of material things. In his wanderings also in search of materials that he would need for his sculptures, he discovered in Monteverdi, a hilly village of Etruscan origin, an eighteenth-century villa surrounded by a large park of tall trees. It is the villa of the “Querciaiole” one kilometer away from Monteverdi: Stefanacci buys it and leaves Prato for good.
In the photo on the left, the Villa delle Querciolaie in Monteverdi
The new environment becomes a source of inspiration for his new work, more and more addressed towards an exasperated symbolic research. The environment his favourable to him: Stefanacci builds a big oven there, to bake his ceramics, melt bronze and chisel stone. His vision gets wider, ranges over the environment surrounding his estate, especially a wood of age-old trees, rooted on a rocky soil, rich of stones of any dimension coming to light during the wood setting job. Blocks of limestone that will be useful later for two reasons: first in order to re-adapt and outline again some ruins that have already been shaped, transforming them into elegant stone little villas whose architecture has been projected by Stefanacci himself. Maybe the idea is to transform the place into a farm holidays zone, but Stefanacci hasn’t yet thought about it, busy as he is with decorating with his ceramics both the inside and the outside of these rooms where arches and structures ed on ancient architectural principles can be found.

“Il movimento della vita”

And then, La Villa delle Querciolaie a Monteverdi on large blocks of lime- stone, he has put his monumental sculptures that fit nicely with the undergrowth and the plantation of trees pointing out, with their presence, an artistic path where all the main features of Stefanaccis research can be found .
An image particularly loved by the artist is the one of Father and Son: a little baby on his father’s lap, looking upward in the attempt to join him. The father’s left arm wraps and holds his son to protect him while he holds a stick, symbol of power, in the other hand. As for the colours, the son is naked, devoid of all vices and emotions, and wears lust a light blue garment to show his mother s origin. The father is wrapped in an orange mantle, representing his full sunny spirituality and his head is white, meaning the pureness of thought.
Stefanacci in front of
Stefanacci in front of “la riconciliazione del figlio col padre”

Here is therefore the progress of the artist s initiatory path, always ‘tormented’ by a desire to talk by symbols. In the meanwhile the images of the moon and of the sun, dealing respectively with an emotional message or a synthesis one, can often be found in his works. Conscious of how easily emotions can be produced, the artist embraces this reality with a great variety about his choice of themes and means: the material isn’t either limited or limiting because “he who works by Synthesis” -Stefanacci says- “needs everything, and excluding anything would make the Synthesis apocryphal and unfinished”. In fact working with the entire matter means enhancing knowledge.

“La vita lunare” (bronzo su albarese)

The regular moving of Nature in the network of heavy and subtle elements’ forces is related to the same mobility about his choice of means and materials. Thus the beauty of iris colours impressed by the brush on the canvas has left space to as much beauty, the one of shapes and colours hidden in the heart of stone. It’s surprising how some simple black lines impressed on a white surface can represent the some shapes present in Nature although concealed. the artist tries to observe these shapes and bring them to light.
From the commonest clay through a shaping work, pictures of images living in our mind con be drawn out thanks to the union and harmonious association of the four elements of Water, Air, Earth and Fire. Accomplishing the making of a ceramic means to Stefanacci- realizing an alchemic transformation process starting with the decomposition of mineral earth substances, the moulding process through water, the drying process through air and the fixing of colours through fire. “In the artistic expression -Stefanacci warns- any mean necessary to aesthetic gratification can be used; nevertheless a perfect harmony of strength, beauty and synthesis” con be achieved only by using the Square, the Compass, the Plumb line and the Trowel. And he adds that these simple tools have got in themselves the laws that rule the whole Nature’s plan, and that it’s thanks to the knowledge of these laws that the great masters of the past have managed to create everlasting and magnificent works of art to teach all good will generations who have followed. (6) (6)
One of his latest works is an ancient and lost symbol, forgotten in a Southern Italy (7) showcase and few centimetre high: unknown to everybody. The artist has wanted to bring it back to light making it of bronze, some two-three meter high, not with the aim of copying its shape, yet its meaning, symbolizing the ascent of Man From the Earth to the Sky. Stefanacci has called it “The Alchemy of Elements” and has put it on a cement and stone basement in one of the most suggestive corners of the park in front of his villa, situated so that the sun stresses its own meanings: in the lower part the Four elements (Air, Water, Earth and Fire) decomposed can be noticed, each containing the other but in an unbalanced way. he light in the middle represents uprightness; the stretched arms symbolize the man who starts getting rid of passions and watches the whole Nature and is in harmony with it at last. Upwards the two opposites disappear, he transcends dualism and gets pure (pureness is symbolized by the crystal in the middle).

“L’alchimia degli elementi”

The awakening of symbol has produced an awakening in the artist himself, to be hoped also for those who will be able to interpret this work correctly “Art -Stefanacci says- has thus the new meaning to remind mankind about the traces and messages handed down along centuries by our fathers in order to lead us in the darkness towards light, from Hell to Heaven and from profane to sacred”.
In fact in Stefanacci’s works both the rise of Man towards God and the motion of the earthly ground are represented in their struggle one against the other in a chaotic whirl of creation and destruction.
.
Stone:
Thanks to his varied choice of means and materials, he had lately devoted himself to the creation of fountains, in order to represent the motion of waters and of their vivifying and destroying action. These, visible in the gardens and squares of some countries in the world, remind constantly about the strength of clear waters mixing with putrid ones, in the continuous cycle of regeneration and destruction of Nature and of any living being. “I’m contemplating, I don’t think any longer” Stefanacci let out in a moment of detached contemplation. And then we wonder whether Stefanacci has managed to achieve his inner symbolic self control. But it won’t be his duty to give the answer, his works will, which can open a wide road to Knowledge

“La via alchemica”

Bronzo: “Il dominio degli opposti

NOTE
(6)Here is a coming back to the iniatory doctrines on which Stefanacci’s research is based, since he has never neglected the deep esoteric meanings, as well as the alchemic methods of the research itself, on creating his works both in ceramics, bronze and in stone as well.
(7)Excavations and Museum of Santa Restituta in Lacco Ameno, where the several cultures of Isola d’Ischia are visible. The symbol stood in a showcase, nearly forgotten and without any precise reference. And it had appealed Stefanacci thanks to its shape. The symbol appeared on an almost forgotten bulletin board with no precise references. And it had attracted Stefanacci’s interest due to its conftguration.

In the quiet of Monteverdi

“L’amore per la giustizia del paese”

When Stefanacci chose the town of Monteverdi for his “creative idleness”, he evaluated the sources of inspiration that this environment could offer him, largely invaded by woods and Mediterranean scrub and overlooking the Cornia plain where traditions still resist peasant and typical structures of the Middle Ages. A country, that is, with a dimension of life and therefore ideal for making it the place of one’s meditations. Stefanacci, only apparently solitary, fits into the life of the adopted country that welcomes him and in a certain sense makes him Monteverdi’s honorary artist also because he demonstrates his willingness to leave traces of his work in the urban fabric of the place.
In the photo on the right View of Monteverdi.

In a habitat that evokes ancient memories and offers the visitor ruins of great suggestion, such as the Abbey of San Pietro in Palazzuolo on the slopes of a hill, or the bridge of the Old Mine on the Riotorto, and at the same time maintains an exceptional ecological balance in the woods populated by all kinds of animals, from wild boars to roe deer, mouflons, squirrels, badgers.

“Il sacrificio dell’Arma”

Stefanacci’s first sculpture is placed near the Carabinieri barracks and reproduces, in bronze on Alberese, the “Sacrifice of the Weapon”, a large figure that “contains” the symbols of fidelity and justice.
It is the first concrete approach between the artist and the place now appointed to welcome his works with an operation desired above all by himself. From his generosity, but also from the desire to link his name to a historical, rural environment, which has all the characteristics to preserve the signs of his art, closely linked to nature and which takes its nourishment from nature, inspired by symbolic meanings that run through it far and wide and that give complete meaning to the work.
The long reconnaissance in the most evocative corners of the country, the awareness of the needs linked to facts and events in the life of the country itself, arrive at a global proposal.
Then the link between the municipality and the artist is realized with the donation of numerous works, already installed and to be installed; donation that is accepted by the city council. Stefanacci thus enters by right into the history of the country, increasing its artistic and cultural heritage. There will be practically no corner that will not host Stefanacci’s artistic works, some of which, mostly

“Il nonno” (1985)

ceramic bas-reliefs are located in the Palazzo Comunale, in the Mayor’s room, in the Council Chamber, on the stairs. A large bas-relief depicting “The Country’s Love for Justice” is positioned outside, at the entrance to the town, as if to constitute a reference “signal” of what will later become a real artistic journey of his work.
Numerous other works will enrich the town: a war memorial to be placed in the historic center, two fountains to be placed one in the square of the tower, and the other in the “Tub of the Weight in Canneto; a tombstone-monument to the fallen, in the area of the municipal cemetery of Canneto. For a Canneto castle, a bronze sculpture on stone to be placed inside and other ceramic bas-reliefs for the arch of the entrance door. Finally, a commemorative event for the inauguration of the Enel geothermal power plant.
Some ceramics within the Municipality of Monteverdi Some ceramics within the Municipality of Monteverdi.

The Metamorphosis

One of Stefanacci’s last sculptures is called “Metamorphosis“, and is the emblem of a radical change in his work which has reached an extraordinary and unpredictable synthesis, with the abandonment of classical schemes and the discovery of abstraction with the usual tools symbolic: the square, the compass “Thoughts” and the pendulum wire. Stefanacci came to the knowledge to transform matter: in the pietra serena, travertine and alberese he models spherical, rounded shapes, where the images are no longer visual but constitute a movement of synthesis of the material.
Going up the driveway to the villa, a long series of sculptures flanks the right side, forming an ideal path that in a certain sense marks the stages of Stefanacci’s artistic evolution:
the small stone fountains with strange bronze fish, symbolic women, bronze figures that stand out against stone backgrounds, faces sketched in the alberese. Going up to the laboratory, the first sculptures of the new research, of a livid white, very smooth that highlight the traces of a long finishing work such as to make them of an extraordinary purity, but where those symbolic signals to which Stefanacci continues to “resist” still “resist” reference.
Because the form has changed, but the substance of the idea remains intact; as in the “clash of opposites,” in which the eye of the divinity stands out in the magic triangle, a hint of the ancient philosophical doctrines that are the keys to reading his research.

“Creativity”

His work is addressed in a circular dimension, in sphericity, with the memory that everything is born in the magic of the circle, according to the sciences of the initiates. A “Maternity” with still classic lines, albeit hinted at, where the woman surrounds a lunar child with her arms; the “Woman with one breast” who gives life to the movement, but does not become corrupted; a large “bleeding heart” that becomes a symbol of broken love. Stefanacci’s production in this last period is incredible in quantity and inventiveness.

La Rinascita (1960)

From his hands sculptures, even large ones, are born, always and in any case inspired by the ideals of his initiatory path, which is also revealed in the titles: “Fatigue of movement”, “C reactivity”, and the reference to the primitive forms of life with ” The child linked to the mother ”,“ Androgynous formation ”,“ Embryo ”,“ The mother of the world ”,“ Tiring birth ”. Or a simple “Motherhood” carved in stone, where the idea, the hint of the mother holding the child, is made with very few curves that define the image with extraordinary emotion. And elsewhere the reference to the ailments of our existence: The cry of the beast “,” The beast “; to then come to meditation: “Thoughts or” The old man who regenerates “.
But in the meantime, taking up a creative trend that in the past had led him to create small stone fountains decorated with bronze, Stefanacci broadens the range of his investigation, and proposes himself as a real manufacturer of furnishing fountains for particular environments. Thus were born the fountains of the “Swan”, the “Dolphin”, the “Elements” and the “Turtle”, works that will get him the commission of a large installation for the square of a residential center in Sydney in Australia, a monumental work representing the quaternary, the four elements that contain each other in an unbalanced form.

“Marziana”

And Stefanacci’s message crosses the ocean, to leave important traces of himself in a constantly growing nation, which demonstrates to appreciate the work of this brilliant Tuscan sculptor, so much that an Australian museum is negotiating for the location of some of his sculptures permanently.

“L’alchimia degli elementi”

Meglio star svegli
per capire,
che dormire
per sognare…
Beato chi attraverso
la terra
si riconosce
figlio del cielo…
chi non si è spaventato
alle paure della vita
non può avere
timore di quelle
della morte…
Rolando Stefanacci

Fatica in movimento

In the geometry and architecture of the park and the wood, where Stefanacci’s works live as in a large open-air museum, there is always a mental, symbolic design, an ideal path, which in essence is that of man in search of absolute truths. A man who pours his anxieties, now his moments of happiness, into these multiform sculptures that are born with incredible rhythm, despite the technical difficulties involved in working a tenacious material, resistant to the hand of man. Yet Stefanacci, and confides it with extreme simplicity, claims not to feel physical fatigue at all.

“La fontana del cigno”

Probably because he is supported and stimulated by that thirst for spiritual research that absorbs all his thoughts and makes him live in a state of happy creativity. The place he has chosen to work and meditate, drowned in the hills a stone’s throw from the Tuscan Maremma, is ideal for facilitating his spirituality. It is a place of silence (but “whoever has knowledge – says Stefanacci – does not suffer from loneliness”) and he reaches “his” truth not with words, but by listening to silence. His “maxims”, scattered all over the house and in the laboratory, indicate the meditative character of Stefanacci who, precisely through meditation, creates these sculptures that today are completely transformed in form and idea, aerial and lunar, germinated by a thrust of renewal which, however, is only the result of a journey through one’s soul.

Rolando Stefanacci Artist.

The Discovery of Painting

Love for Ceramics

A Choice of life

In the quiet of Monteverdi

The Metamorphosis

Photo gallery

Società Agricola Il Gabbiano s.r.l.

Villa Le Querciolaie: