How We Built the Siloe Sculpture Symposium

Turning a Tuscan monastery into a laboratory for international sculpture.

On a high hill in the Maremma, facing the Ombrone Valley, Monte Amiata and the Val d’Orcia, the Siloe Monastery has long been a place where architecture, light and contemplation meet. In 2025 it becomes something more: a living workshop for stone, a stage for dialogue between artists and the community.

The Siloe Sculpture Symposium unfolds across the Jubilee year in three working sessions: 5–19 May, 7–21 July, and 30 September–14 October 2025. In each session four artists carve on site; by the end of the year twelve artists from different countries will have created permanent works for Siloe. Talks, open-studio visits and meetings with schools frame the process so visitors can witness sculpture take shape in real time.

Why Siloe

Siloe is a place designed for attention: forms, materials and light suggest a slow rhythm that counters today’s frenzy. The Symposium embraces that spirit. Here, art is not an event but a practice—time, patience and care—so that a work can emerge first in the sculptor and then in the stone.

How we organized it

I coordinated the project together with the Siloe community and a network of partners. Marble blocks were donated by Eugenio Dell’Amico, equipment is on site, and the working stones are human-scale to keep the focus on the relationship between person and material. Artists are hosted at the monastery and receive a small contribution to expenses—because we wanted a spirit of community, not competition.

Who is involved

Across the year, the roster brings together voices from Canada, Colombia, Argentina, Israel, Japan, Palestine, Egypt, Finland, Belarus and Italy, among others—artists chosen for the depth of their practice and their capacity to speak to the present. The aim is simple and ambitious: let sculpture become a bridge between earth and sky, matter and thought, and send a clear message of peace, freedom and connection with nature.

Working alongside the invited artists

Besides leading the program, Lorenzo Vignoli works in the yard as one of the sculptors, carving a new piece created during the symposium—so the organizing vision and the artistic practice meet in the same dust and daylight.

What visitors will find

Open carving days, artist talks and a growing constellation of works around the monastery and its paths. The symposium is also an invitation for students and young artists to watch, ask questions and understand processes—from roughing to surfaces and finishes. By the end of 2025, Siloe will keep the works as a permanent landscape for future visitors.

Follow the project, come to Siloe, and—if you wish—support the initiative. Every conversation in front of a stone in progress is already part of the artwork.