It often happens in the art world: an artist’s sensitivity can anticipate stories, trends, and at times even the future itself. I think of the Futurist architect Sant’Elia, who envisioned buildings, underground tunnels, and skyscrapers with design drawings that still strike us today with their sci‑fi modernity; or of the destructive chaos in Cy Twombly’s works, a kind of nothingness made of extraordinary ballpoint‑pen scribbles that eerily foreshadow today’s self‑destruction of values—not only the questionable ones, but also the foundational and deepest values of Western culture.
Villa Cambiaso in Savona
After this premise, Polimnia flies to Savona and arrives at Villa Cambiaso, an ancient patrician villa where its owner, the Savonese artist Pio Vintera (1940–2020), found his physical and mental space to create art and culture.
Today the villa has been beautifully restored and is managed by his sons, Veronica and Mattia, who host events, exhibitions, and cultural initiatives through the Cultural Association Museo Villa Cambiaso. It is almost a metaphysical island in a city that has changed profoundly in recent years.
Just a few weeks ago, a beautiful retrospective dedicated to Pio’s canvases was held here, set beneath the Renaissance vaults of the villa’s fascinating patrician cellars. The villa, with its splendid Italian garden, stands along Via Torino—the historic road that once connected the port city of the Torretta with the Piedmontese capital.
“Pio Vintera at Villa Cambiaso, in Savona: urban traces, memory, and an underground soul.”
A journey through hidden views, graffiti, and fragments of the city that become markers of time.
We were speaking of artists’ ability to anticipate ideas, events, and trends. This was also true of Pio Vintera, a Savonese artist whose creativity foreshadowed urban pop. He managed to capture not only corners and glimpses of his city through writings and graffiti on walls, but also small details capable of conveying the sense of time in a place and of those who passed through it. At the same time, Pio’s canvases are like time capsules, freezing in color fleeting moments of an urban landscape that now belongs to the past—to those weeks, to those days.
All of this emerges especially in his views of Savona.
A premise: when we think of vedutisti, we imagine classic cityscapes with the most interesting panoramas or significant monuments. With Pio, it is different. His are hidden, curious, particular corners marked by a sign—fragments of the city located in the very center yet somehow outside it. Side streets of escape where thoughts, writings, and graffiti landed on the walls without filters and, in the constant flow of everyday life, became signs and points of reference, locally iconic. Their existence was often ephemeral, though some lasted longer—or even still exist today.
"Vintera’s canvases as time capsules: city corners that endure in memory.”
An intimate look at vanished places, urban details, and stories resurfacing through color.
Having known Pio and lived in the same city allows me, when I look at his canvases, to rediscover my own personal experience of those corners—some of which have disappeared forever beneath a new coat of paint, yet for some strange reason left a trace in my memory of daily routes. All of this brings me even closer to his thought and his vision, now clearer than ever.
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Villa Cambiaso
Via Torino, 10 - 17100 Savona (Italy)
www.villacambiaso.it
