‘Carrara and Pietrasanta are localities famous through-out the world for their marble. But, as the exhibition «Birth of Sculpture» shows, Car-rara and Pietrasanta are still places where the ideas and models of sculptors from all over the world are trans-formed by the labour and experience of stone-cutters and craftsmen in those finished works that we can admire in squares, important buildings and places of worship… . An exhibition of sculpture, but above all an exhibition of culture organized by Fred Licht, curator of Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim collection. Divided into sections, the exhibition deals with the various aspects of ‘sculpture’. Sculpture as the ‘action of sculpturing’: a real-life laboratory will be set up where Pietrasanta craftsmen (or bet-ter still, ‘artists’) will show, how matter is ‘shaped’. Sculpture as ‘finished work’: the works of numerous contemporary artists will be, exhibited. But, above all, ‘sculpture as art’, which communicates, which evokes, which makes evident, besides the speci-fic aspects of each work, that dynamism whereby shape-less matter takes on form. At the end of a complex itinerary, the exhibition will attempt to communicate that same amazement which provoked Heidegger to define sculpture as «the embodiment of the truth of the Being in his work instituting places».’