Alimondo Ciampi Biography
Alimondo Ciampi, born Arimondo Silvio (San Mauro a Signa, 18 December 1876 – Florence, 8 December 1939), was an Italian sculptor. Hired in the Tuscan capital as an apprentice in a marble and alabaster workshop, he quickly learned the secrets of the trade, then perfecting himself on an artistic level in the studio of the sculptor Antonio Bortone. The already thirty-year-old alabaster, however, matured following the dictates of Domenico Trentacoste, then a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, who launched him towards the finish line of the Venice Biennale where he exhibited his works in 1909. He therefore began to establish himself on a national level around the age of twenty-five years. He was present with his works in five editions of the Venice Biennale from 1909 to 1924 and in many other exhibitions. In Scandicci he sculpted the War Memorial in Piazza Umberto I (now Piazza Matteotti), erected in 1926. In 1998 an anthological exhibition of around fifty works was set up in the ancient church of San Lorenzo a Signa, including statues in plaster, terracotta and bronze and marble from the modern art galleries of Florence and Montecatini and from private collections, fully summarized the artist's forty years of work, between the beginning of the century and 1939, the year of his death. Recently the Municipal Administration of Signa wanted to set up a permanent exhibition of 8 bronze sculptures inside the public gardens of Piazza della Repubblica, thanks to Alimondo's son, Giotto Ciampi, who financed its creation. In justifying this choice Giotto Ciampi said that to honor his father's activity he did not consider it sufficient to have an exhibition that would be forgotten after a few months or even a good book which, in the best of cases, would soon end up gathering dust on a shelf: a museum alive, however, with the works placed in natural environments dedicated to children, in addition to making their father's work known, it would have contributed to inserting the taste for beauty and pleasure for art into the education of the younger generations.
