From September 16 to October 31, 2020, hosted on the terraces of Forte di Belvedere overlooking Florence, is the spectacular photography exhibition by Massimo Sestini, “Bellezza oltre il limite (Beauty Beyond the Pale)”, curated by Sergio Risaliti, sponsored by the Region of Tuscany and the City of Florence, created by the Fondazione Sistema Toscana, Toscana Promozione Turistica and Mus.e.

Twenty huge images to promote Tuscany around the world, premiering in Florence.

The photos show a Tuscany portrayed from an unprecedented perspective: the shots were taken at a height of 2000 feet, but with lenses that made it possible to get very close to the scenes being photographed, framed in a most original and innovative way. The result goes beyond photography to become a work of art.

Massimo Sestini’s exhibition is an artistic interpretation of the concept of “Toscana, Rinascimento senza fine (Tuscany. The Endless Renaissance)”, developed by Toscana Promozione Turistica, in collaboration with Fondazione Sistema Toscana, to promote the Region throughout the world. The images in this photographic journey strongly convey this message, and in fact are rooted in the artistic, cultural and landscape heritage of Tuscany, the cradle of the Renaissance. With an original and unprecedented vision, they show the wonder of the locations, offering the observer an immense repository of Italian history. And the promotion campaign makes precisely this claim: after 500 years, the motherland of the Renaissance continues to nourish souls and reinvigorate the senses, through all its riches and colours. The campaign, “Toscana. Rinascimento Senza Fine” is one of a series of complementary and progressive promotional actions implemented in recent months to create new products and new tourist initiatives precisely to intercept national tourism and the first flows from neighbouring countries. The strong points of this tourism strategy can be found in this network, and with an artistic and creative platform to develop most authentic local expressions.

Since the unforgettable Henry Moore exhibition in 1972, the Forte di Belvedere in Florence has become one of the most important and beautiful open-air exhibition spaces in the world. Since there was no exhibition program this year due to lockdown, it is reopening in these last days of summer with the photos by Massimo Sestini, veritable installations (each one is five meters by three meters), like windows in the landscape standing out against Florence’s skyline.

With these monumentalized images, Massimo Sestini not only shows us classic postcards of beautiful regional locations, but, in the wake of the Futurists’ aeropainting, he rises into the sky and uses photography and extreme performance gestures to invent an unprecedented and extraordinary concept of landscape photography. Those coming to the Forte, where the twenty works by Sestini are on exhibit, will have the sensation of being aboard a large spaceship at a very high altitude over Tuscany. The twenty landscapes have never been seen, because they have definitely never been photographed from such a position and in such a way. At high altitudes and perpendicular, with respect to the terrestrial plane, which as we know, is not flat.

The title says it all. Beauty Beyond the Pale. Because the landscapes exhibited have a boundless beauty, and also because of the way they were framed. Massimo Sestini often flies to create his works, in helicopters or military planes, descending into the abyss, and when the means of transport prevents him from taking a certain shot from above, he invents gymnastic and technical solutions to find ways to move his telephoto lens where no human hand can reach. He is less interested in reproducing reality than experiencing the process provided by his photographic and performance approach.

The landscapes are often unrecognizable, resembling paintings, with brushstrokes of different colours or seemingly composed of layered fabrics. Material mixtures with an impressive abstract quality, recalling not real places but works by artists. And even when the photographed scene is recognizable for what it is – a bicycle race, buttari or herdsmen with their cattle, a line of carts in front of the supermarket during lockdown or bathers on a beach – the shadows cast next to the miniscule human or animal figures, almost reduced to coloured dots, seem to make ghosts sprout up on the landscape, suggesting the ancient magic lantern plays of light. In the end, even the most extreme technology can be used to generate emotion and wonder, transporting the viewer back to a magic childhood world.