The Orta River Valley Nature Reserve, in Majella National Park, is one of the most beautiful and wild areas in the entire Abruzzo region. Here, located at an altitude of 300 meters above sea level and surrounded by the Abruzzo Apennines is Bolognano, a splendid art village; its origins are very ancient, so much so that it appears to have been inhabited since the Copper Age.
It was 1972 when Joseph Beuys arrived in Bolognano for the first time, invited by Baron Buby Durini and his wife, Baroness Lucrezia De Domizio Durini: there was no highway yet and the road was stony and winding, but here he spent the last 15 years of his life making some of his most important works. Born in West Germany, after World War II he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, becoming over the years a leading advocate of art as a tool for critical consciousness and active involvement of the viewer.
One of his major works, created precisely in the small Abruzzi village, was Difesa della Natura (Defense of Nature): a project with a strong ecological but also anthropological value, understood as a defense of man, human values, and the creativity of individuals, in a continuous close relationship between man, the artistic gesture and thus art, nature and the earth. A four-year long work of planting trees and shrubs of different species to protect biodiversity and endangered species. Planting Paradise, became a kind of paradise of 7000 trees and shrubs of different species; the preparation of the land, chosen within the estate of Barons Durini, began in 1982 and two years later the artist delivered the final list of specimens chosen for planting. On May 13, 1984 in Bolognano, Beuys held the historic public discussion “Defense of Nature,” and on the same occasion he was awarded the town’s honorary citizenship. But his efforts do not stop there indeed, fifteen years later he created the work Olivestone, consisting of five stone tanks used for decanting oil in which blocks are inserted, leaving only a small channel free, inside which the oil flows. The work aimed to evoke memories, experienced places, and seasons in the viewer through the stimulation of the sense of smell.
As a result of these experiences, the baroness transformed the Abruzzi village of Bolognano into a place of living memory for her master, even founding the Paradise Museum of Joseph Beuys, a private museum desired by the baroness herself, who has since never ceased to defend Beuysian work, spreading its message around the world with lectures, exhibitions, donations, and plantings.
In the years to follow, several other famous artists and intellectuals have linked their names to the village, trying to make it still alive and bring in those tourists who can appreciate its value, creating a true open-air museum, easily reached by driving along the A25 highway and taking the Torre de’ Passeri exit.
