Just who do you think you are? The Gargano peninsula has always traded in a certain currency. It is the coin of sun-bleached limestone, of the deep, impossible blue of the Adriatic, of the scent of salt and frying olive oil. It is a place of profound, ancient, and tangible pleasures.
It is not, by any historical measure, a place for the giant, metallic balloon dogs of Jeff Koons. Or so I thought, before I found myself running into the Mayor of Vieste, Giuseppe Nobiletti, and the formidable Councillor for Culture, Graziamaria Starace. We found ourselves not in some sterile municipal office, but at Il Porto Vecchio (the Old Port)—with Gozzi (traditional blue and white fishing boats) silhouetted against the waterfront lined with excellent seafood restaurants, trattorias, and bars.
The setting was a perfect metaphor for their ambition: to weave something utterly new into the very old fabric of this town. One does not expect to find, nestled between a trattoria and a souvenir shop selling ceramic whistles, a civic archaeological museum housing the haunting humanist photography of Steve McCurry. Or to learn that a community library is, for the summer, playing host to the delirious dreams of Salvador Dalí. And one certainly does not anticipate that a piazza once reserved for evening passeggiate would be commandeered by the gleaming, populist specters of Koons.
This is not the typical summer arts festival, that tired parade of local watercolors and indifferent pottery. This is a brazen effort to plant a flag and declare Vieste a capital of the avant-garde. And the generals of this campaign are a soft-spoken mayor with the weary eyes of a pragmatist and a cultural minister with the unquenchable fire of a true believer. “We did not want something easy,” Starace told me, her words precise, her gaze fixed. “We wanted a shock. A beautiful shock. We wanted to ask our people, and our visitors, to look again.
To see our beauty reflected in a different kind of mirror.” Mayor Nobiletti nodded, his demeanor that of a man who has learned to trust a visionary’s compass. “Culture is not a cost,” he said, a line so perfectly honed I suspected it was the administration’s mantra. “It is an investment. An investment in the identity of a place.
We have the sea. We have the history. Now we wish to have the conversation.” The conversation, in 2025 has been a shouting match of genius across time and medium. In one quarter, McCurry’s “Food” exhibit (also known as “Cibo”), offers a sober, gritty counter-narrative to Vieste’s culinary abundance—his photographs a global prayer of sustenance and survival. It is a quiet, profound meditation that grounds the entire endeavour in humanity.
Then, just a stone’s throw away, Jeff Koons arrives like a carnival barker of the sublime. His sculptures—those mirror-finish baubles of desire and childhood—are not merely displayed; they perform. They reflect the ancient stone walls, the deep Puglian sky, the astonished faces of the viewers, sucking the entire environment into their flawless, vacuous, and brilliant surfaces. It is high art as the ultimate selfie opportunity, and it is devilishly clever.
To see a local fisherman, his skin leathered by the sun, staring bemusedly at a magenta Balloon Dog is to see the entire cultural experiment in a single, perfect frame. And if that were not enough, the town has invited the ghost of Dalí to the conversation. Tucked away in the Community Library, his work provides the Freudian id to Koons’s ego—the raw, subconscious impulse before it was polished for mass consumption. It is the necessary thread, connecting the surrealism of dreams to the surrealism of modern commerce.
This trifecta is the brainchild of artistic director Giuseppe Benvenuto, but its soul is being provided by the town itself. The real masterpiece on display here is not by McCurry, Koons, or Dalí. It is the administration’s audacious vision. It is the sight of high school students acting as guides for Dalí’s dreamscapes. It is the image of a town known for its spaghetti alle vongole willingly, eagerly, wrestling with the complex themes of consumerism and desire.
I came to Vieste expecting a pleasant coastal holiday with a side of art. I left contemplating something far richer: the radical act of a community choosing to define itself not by what it has always been, but by what it dares to become. This summer, Vieste left us to ponder the most compelling question of all: in our search for meaning, are we ultimately nourished by McCurry’s stark truth, seduced by Koons’s brilliant surface, or do we, like Dalí, simply dream of something more profound lurking just beneath?
