For the first time to Spoleto an exhibition of forty-eight "plaster casts" from Fernando Botero's private collection that represent a broad synthesis of his sculptural activity and recall the main iconographic themes of his opera: horsemen, centaurs, male and female figures, dancers, cats, horses and bulls.

In the Municipal Palace - inside the Palatine Chapel of San Ponziano, in the Hall of Spain and the Hall of the Dukes - are plaster sculptures that, like an educational workshop, illustrate the way sculptor Fernando Botero works.

Drawing on to technical favors, plaster can be said to be a matrix structure; looking at it as an emotional, and even spiritual effect, it can be considered to be the soul of every sculpture. Indeed, it is no to coincidence that many plaster works today are unique pieces in the world and considered themselves masterpieces, the marble or bronze originals no longer existing and having been lost or destroyed. Even Canova, precisely with a plaster copy of The Wrestlers, came into the limelight by winning a prize, while in the gallery of the Accademia in Florence one can admire the plaster original of Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women, 1582.

Botero's first experiences with sculpture date back to the 1960s, but he would demonstrate his great love for the discipline from 1973. Botero's sculptures can be found in the streets and squares of the world's most important cities. The exhibition, therefore, besides to containing plaster works, offers, a monumental bronze sculpture displayed outside. In addition to art enthusiasts and historians, the exhibition is also of particular importance to schoolchildren, who, thanks to the aforementioned "didactic" on sculpture, can call it "interactive," fully grasping the current need of our youth.