The Tarot Garden

Artist Niki de Saint Phalle has created a magnificent Tarot Garden with mosaic sculptures that represent the Major Arcana.

Situated in the Italian village of Capalbio, it started in the late nineteen-seventies when Saint Phalle had a vision to create mosaic representations of the tarot. What Saint Phalle, who died in 2002, left behind in Tuscany is, according to the New Yorker magazine, "dazzling or deranged, transcendent or tawdry, depending on whom you ask. Amid peaceful olive groves and ochre fields grazed by horses and sheep sits a house-size sculpture of a sphinx, with mirrored blue hair and a bright-red crown, a flower blooming on one of her breasts and a lavender heart on the nipple of the other. The interior is covered in shards of mirror, as if a colossal disco ball had been turned inside out. (During the two decades that Saint Phalle worked on the garden, her bedroom was inside one breast, her kitchen in the other.) A sprawling, fantastical castle, with a rainbow mosaic tower, sits near a blue head some fifty feet high, sprouting a second, mirrored head crowned by a huge hand. Downhill, the Devil stands amid some shrubs, a rainbow-winged hermaphrodite with a sweet face, womanly hips, and three gold penises. It is as if a psychedelic bomb had exploded in the most picturesque part of Tuscany."

For me, it would be something amazing to see!