Beyond the Sea: contemporary art in the rooms of a luxury hotel

The history of Grand Hotel Miramare in Santa Margherita began as far back as 1903, but it was after the Second World War, in the hands of the Milanese entrepreneur Giovanni Fustinoni together with his wife Franca, when it became a "legendary" haunt of the Italian and international jet set, attended by illustrious and interesting guests, not least Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who spent their honeymoon here in 1947.
The Grand Hotel Miramare, however, was also a witness to a chapter in Italian history. In 1933, in August, Guglielmo Marconi, pioneer of modern radiocommunication and Nobel Prize winner for Physics in 1909, transmitted from a terrace of the Hotel, now the Marconi veranda, the first radiotelegraph and radiotelephone signal in history at a distance of 150 kilometers.
From that time on, the hotel became Marconi's headquarters, and the suite in which he stayed still bears his name.

Nowadays, the Grand Hotel is home of part of Andrea and Fabio Fustinoni's contemporary art collection, a collection built up over the past two decades. Passionate about design and historicized artists, at the beginning of the new millennium, the two collectors changed "course" and dove into contemporary art.
"The miramART collection was born from a terrible grief that hit my family," explains Andrea Fustinoni, "which forced me to exclusively take care of the hotel, and so no longer having much time for my passions, such as that for contemporary art, with Fabio we decided to invite the players of contemporary art to the hotel.
"So in 2014, together with friend and artist Andrea Botto, the miramART association was born to promote contemporary art through exhibitions, meetings, conversations, commissioned works and art projects in the Tigullio area," concludes Andrea Fustinoni.
From there onwards, a series of projects led to the creation of the collection, which has the focus "on artists who today explore and shape, through their works, the moment we are living in," as narrated in Beyond The Sea catalog edited by Rischa Paterlini and published by Allemandi.

Andrea and Fabio's passion is "collecting pieces of the reality" for the historic Marconi Veranda, the two collectors decided to exhibit Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Homosexual) Man by artists Elmegreen & Dragset, two black-and-white photographs of the artists portrayed as children and the caption "sorry mama." The artists refer, with a delicate vein of melancholy, to standards and expectations that every young man must deal with if you live in a hetero-normed society that has always been accustomed to stigmatizing homosexuality.

Journey through the Grand Hotel Miramare's rooms

Numerous projects that artists have created for Andrea and Fabio's collection scattered throughout the hotel's rooms and guests can admire during their stay. With some artists "a great affection was born, such as Adrian Paci” as Andrea Fustinoni likes to tell.
In the junior suite, Room 121, hangs a photographic shot of Adrian Paci project The Column, a 27-minute video from 2012 that tells the story of a   marble slab extracted from a quarry in China, placed on a ship and then sculpted by a group of Chinese craftsmen during a voyage on the Ocean. The photo features a classical-style column with a Corinthian capital laid down inside the ship surrounded by dust and illuminated by a few rays of light. 

In several rooms including the Deluxe Suite Marconi 501 various works by Swiss artist Uriel Orlow hang in dialogue with the magnificent garden surrounding the Miramare Hotel. In the photographs of The Memory of Trees series, the artist re-constructs a national history and identity by helping us discover not only political and social narratives and texts but also a more spiritual one.
In these works the artist shows trees as witnesses to history: each photograph, each tree tells a different story. For example, the wild almond tree in Cape Town was planted in 1660 by the first Dutch settlers. 

In the hall on the second floor Restaurant View Cairo, Egypt, 2002 by Armin Linke. The photograph shows a terrace surrounded by a patina of dust in a restaurant of modest standards in the neighborhood of Cairo with tables and chairs oriented toward a hazy sea that at first glance might instead be mistaken for a seaside scene but a closer observation shows the reality: a day of intense smog and pollution  in Cairo. 

In Deluxe Suite Riviera 110 an artwork consisting of four inkjet prints captured, at different times of the day, early nineteenth-century gas lanterns within and around some birds appear to dance.
Lantern Smasher a work of 2018 by Johan Österholm revolves around the date of birth of the first public gas lanterns when on a warm Autumn evening in 1826 crowds gathered along Unter den Linden in Berlin to watch the lanterns light up and the night glow of a new light. Light is the link between the Österholm works becoming a symbol of life and death, energy and blockage. 

In the works of artist Nona Inescu, the influence of her parents' profession, both geologists, emerges, leading to her multidisciplinary approach to her work ranging from photography to sculpture and video installations that is based on the integration of the human body into its surroundings. The photograph Ficus, 2021 encapsulates the fundamental themes of the artist's poetics: the human body and the natural element. A hand is engulfed by a white, ficus flower immersed in pristine nature. The work displayed in Room 415 allows a further relationship with the great park surrounding the Hotel, which develops with terraces towards the first slopes of Mount Portofino, where the maritime pines, olive trees, Lebanese cedars and hydrangeas and irises can be found. 

In the beautiful setting of the restaurant overlooking the pool is Aventura (Tanger), a terracotta and sand sculpture by Renato Leotta an artist working between Acireale and Turin who through his artistic practice observes the landscape around him: evocations of maritime scenery, glimpses of rural Sicily and volcanic beaches at the foot of Etna are interwoven with reflections on Turin's industrial past in a continuous tension between urbanized spaces and those immersed in nature.  Aventura (Tanger) which bears the name of a port city in the Mediterranean, was realized in 2016 during the artist’s six-week period of stay in Portugal wandering on the beaches of the Atlantic coast north of the capital and kelt himself busy noticing the figures stamped on the sand by the waves. 

In the CEO's office above a cabinet is a black-and-white photograph that features a text "Even today nothing." The work titled Posthumous Project is by Massimo Bartolini, and it is a shot that dates back to 2008 when the artist decided to create a large-scale intervention on the facade of one of MAXXI's buildings looking toward Via Masaccio. The phrase for the artist adds to the connotation of the present-future also the past: "even yesterday nothing, the nothing is, was and will be."