Just outside Turin, there is a place where landscape, history and contemporary art co-exist in extraordinary harmony, an embodiment of the principle that inspired me to co-found Italics. La Venaria Reale: an immense, spectacular palace built for hunting and enjoyment, commissioned at the end of the 17th century by the Dukes of Savoy and then expanded – when the family took the royal crown – by some of the greatest architects of the age, including Filippo Juvarra (1678–1736).

Besides the important palace and village, it also includes an extraordinary park which has been home since 2007 to the Garden of Fluid Sculptures by Giuseppe Penone, an artist whose work I’ve had the luck to get to know up close and who never ceases to amaze me.

One of the leading figures of Arte Povera – an Italian movement of international prominence that emerged at the end of the 1960s, led by the now legendary curator Germano Celant – Penone has spent more than fifty years exploring the relationship between humankind and nature. Fourteen of his sculptures, many of which monumental in scale, are installed on the palace grounds. They seem to exist in symbiosis with the surrounding landscape, mapping out a vital poetic path focused on that endless dialogue, a recurrent theme in his work, that has led him to show in major museums all over the world.