Thursday February 8, at 12, the work "For every child about to be born, let an olive tree be planted" by Marcello Gennari, one of the leading personalities of Salento sculpture, who passed away at the age of almost 90 in 2022.

The work, a 2x3 meter panel, was donated to the city at the express wish of the artist's wife and son and was placed on the front wall along the monumental staircase that leads from the main atrium to the upper floors of the Palace Carafa.

The panel was commissioned by private individuals for installation in an atrium of an apartment building in 1978. The title and inspiring motif of the work, as reported on the work itself, is "For every child about to be born, let an olive tree be planted", a sentiment which combined the sweetness of a new birth with the need to preserve and increase our territorial heritage of olive trees, in an era far removed from the recent tragedies connected to Xylella.

The panel was made with an innovative technique, never experimented before by anyone, extremely complex and difficult, that is, "spraying" molten metal (in this case brass) inside the plaster mold of the work, and then reinforcing it on the back with resins and glass wool, which gave the whole thing lightness and solidity. This manufacturing technique was unique in its kind. Gennari went to Milano precisely to "study" the use of molten metals and reinforcing resins.

The work joins the other two sculptures already present in the municipal heritage - San Francesco d'Assisi (1982) and Verso l'altro (2003) - both located in the rooms of the Mayor's Cabinet.
«I thank the Gennari family for wanting this donation – declares the Councilor for Culture Fabiana Cicirillo –which allows us to acquire another work by the master for the municipal heritage, together with the other two already present. Gennari was a highly esteemed artist, who linked much of his production to works in Lecce stone without ever losing the pleasure and desire to experiment, shape and model in other materials. This work which invites us to plant an olive tree for every new born has something prophetic, if we think of the current dramatic situation of olive trees victims of Xylella. For this reason we appreciated it even more by placing it in the municipal house."

Mayor Carlo Salvemini will also be present at the inauguration, together with councilor Cicirillo and the Gennari family.

Biographical notes (from the artist's official website):

He is one of the prominent personalities of Salento culture. He was born in Manduria (Taranto) in 1933. His education took place in Lecce at the “G. Pellegrino” under the expert guidance of the sculptor Guido Gremigni. After the master's transfer, he occupied the chair of sculpture, still in the same Institute, from 1952 to 1992. Gennari is a sensitive artist and technically aware of the infinite expressive potential of stone which he expertly constructs by furrowing it with an almost pictorial graphism.

This technique allows him to create elegant, but at the same time highly plastic, structures that capture light and refract it in subtle chiaroscuro effects. His works emanate a profound spirituality, it is as if the sculptor had patiently extracted the light of the soul from the stone with the chisel and the calloused palms of his hands. Marcello Gennari is the poet of fervor and hope, but also of melancholy. He did not seek aesthetic satisfaction or intellectualistic artificiality in his structures, but profound adherence to an intimate reality.

His greatness lies precisely in this, in being able to obtain and resolve, with all humility, but with the tenacity of his faith, one of the essential problems of artistic creativity, that of identity between life and art. His works prove that in sculpture there is room for the hand and the mind, for narration and evocation, for reality and fable, for rationality and dreams.

His production is scattered among museums and Italian and foreign cities but it is important to underline that he worked a lot for his Lecce, a city he loved and internalized. Let's remember just some of his works that brought him success and fame: the structure located in the Vatican Radio headquarters in Rome, a large sculpture that symbolizes the world and the waves of ether that gravitate around it; a high relief (6 mx 25 m) for the Salesian church, the statue of the Madonna almost five meters high and all the furnishings for the church of San Domenico Savio in Brindisi. He has received numerous awards and certificates for his undisputed skill.