"Pietra leccese". A pliable and seductive material, extracted for centuries from the bowels of a region abundant with stones - Salento - for building, decorating, sculpting, producing the manufactured goods of material culture... The large quarries in the area surrounding Cannole, Cursi, Martano, Palmariggi, gave birth over time to the precious historic centres of Salento, through the laborious practice of "lifting" the stone from the darkness of the earth and "revealing it to the light" on the surface.

A culture which was passed down manually through generations of knowledgeable master sculptors and decorators, was produced through astonishing virtuosities, which were already evident from the third century B.C. in the Hellenistic bas-reliefs in the subterranean town of Palmieri in Lecce or the "Greek" fountain in Gallipoli. It is an ancient story which narrates the complex and mysterious syncretisms between an unabated classicism and the exuberance of the Baroque imagination, between the Apollonian and Dionysian, and which has its unexpected roots in Arabic and Byzantine recollections...

Nevertheless, the stimulating quality of this stone does not seem to have exhausted itself.

Artists still succumb to its fascination and illuminated local administrations - and I refer here to the events organized over the years in the territory of the "pietra leccese", from Cursi to Martano - promote its exploitation and diffusion.

Now it is the turn of Cannole, and of an artist, a native of Salento but a globe-trotter by choice, Mario Calcagnile, who proposes the idea of a sculpture symposium, devoted to "pietra leccese" naturally, which places local and international artists face to face with this material.

The challenge is compelling but stimulating: contemporary artists, and in addition "foreign" ones, are called upon to use the traditional materials and methods, welding together the fracture between the past (the traditional methods of sculpting in "pietra leccese") and the present (new artistic language, new motivations for making art, "other" cultures).

One of the most delicate aspects of the issue is undoubtedly the interaction of the sculptures with the environment for which they are destined, the historic centre of Cannole. Only a high degree of technical mastery, culture and sensitivity on the part of the artists invited by Calcagnile can guarantee an intimate and fruitful coexistence between the stratified historical layers of place and the anxious vitality of the art of our times, a reciprocal enrichment which adds value to value. This is the wish we extend to the first sculpture symposium in Cannole.