The Tarot Garden

This Sculpture Garden in Tuscany Is Completely Themed Around Tarot Cards

"Two and a half hours’ drive south of Florence, I finally saw the tips of the sculptures on a hilltop outside Garavicchio and climbed up the drive holding my breath as sunlight glinted off mirrored tiles. What unfolds on the ancient Etruscan site is a 14-acre, three-dimensional tarot deck—22 major-arcana sculptures begun in 1978 and opened in 1998—built by Saint Phalle with a team of artists, electricians and locals using iron frames, cement and handmade, locally fired tiles glazed in bold primary and jewel tones, cartoon pinks and oranges, and tiny mirrors that fracture the sky. The Magician and the High Priestess disgorge an enormous fountain, while Jean Tinguely’s Wheel of Fortune whips water around; other standout works include Strength (a flame-haired woman facing a green-spangled dragon), Justice (a buxom figure with scales for breasts guarding a machine-like Injustice), the prismatic Tree of Life covered in intricate drawings and numbers, and The World with a woman balanced on a rotating golden egg that casts disco-ball reflections across the park. I climbed into the blue-haired Empress/Sphinx—a house-sized sculpture Saint Phalle lived in during construction—where one breast contains a kitchen, the other a bedroom, and almost everything, even the dishwasher, is covered in mirror fragments. The sculptures deliberately invite touch and play, which is why I had brought our three-year-old Julien (who preferred picking up rocks), and why my partner Ben stayed with him while I wandered alone, letting the fixed placement of the cards shape my own personal “reading” as I walked. Saint Phalle drew on the Marseille and Rider–Waite–Smith decks and on a range of architectural signposts—from Gaudí’s Parc Güell to the Gardens of Bomarzo and the Alhambra—but she also poured her imagination into carnivalesque monsters and world-religion iconography; despite suffering from rheumatoid arthritis late in life, she kept dreaming new elements (she was planning a maze when she died in 2002), calling the garden “my husband, my love, my everything.”" - Lauren Elkin