Near the beautiful Capalbio in Maremma lies a garden of unparalleled beauty, the Tarot Garden, created by Niki de Saint de Phalle in the second half of the last century. The Garden is home to the French artist’s large and striking sculptures depicting the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot cards.
Following the inspiration she had during a visit to Antoni Gaudí’s Parque Guell in Barcelona, later reinforced by a visit to the garden of Bomarzo, Niki de Saint Phalle began the construction of the Tarot Garden in 1979. Identifying the Garden as the magical and spiritual dream of her life, Niki de Saint Phalle devoted herself to the construction of the twenty-two imposing steel and concrete figures covered with glass, mirrors and colored ceramics for more than seventeen years, joined not only by several skilled workers but also by a team of famous names in contemporary art such as Rico Weber, Sepp Imhof, Paul Wiedmer, Dok van Winsen, Pierre Marie and Isabelle Le Jeune, Alan Davie, Marino Karella, and especially her husband Jean Tinguely, who died in 1991, who created the metal structures of the enormous sculptures and supplemented some of them with his mécaniques, self-propelled assemblages of mechanical iron elements.
Ricardo Menon, a friend and personal assistant of Niki de Saint Phalle who also passed away a few years ago, and Venera Finocchiaro, a Roman ceramist, also collaborated on the work; the smaller sculptures in the Garden (the Temperance, the Lovers, the World, the Hermit, the Oracle, Death and the Hanged Man), made in Paris with the help of Marco Zitelli, were then produced in polyester by Robert, Gerard and Olivier Haligon.
Ticino architect Mario Botta, in collaboration with Grosseto architect Roberto Aureli, designed the entrance pavilion-a thick enclosure wall with a single large circular opening in the center, conceived as a threshold that clearly divides the Garden from everyday reality.
Finished only in the summer of 1996, the realization of the Garden entailed, in addition to enormous planting work, an expenditure of about 10 billion liras entirely self-financed by the author.
In 1997 Niki de Saint Phalle established The Tarot Garden Foundation whose purpose is to preserve and maintain the work created by the sculptor. The Tarot Garden was opened to the public on May 15, 1998.
