Two works by Takashi Murakami are on view throughout 2026 at Terra Quercus, a small organic wine estate above Sarteano, in the Val d’Orcia, Tuscany. They are there through a partnership between the estate and Miura Gallery, and they are not shown in a gallery room: they hang in the house, where guests and visitors to the cellar meet them in passing, at breakfast, on the way to the pool, with a glass of wine in the evening. This is the first physical home for the gallery’s programme, and this page explains what is there, why it is there and how to see it.
The dining room at Terra Quercus. Photo: Alessandro Micarelli
Terra Quercus
Terra Quercus sits a few kilometres outside Sarteano, on the ridge that looks across the Val d’Orcia towards Monte Amiata. The name means “land of oaks”, and it describes the place: seven hectares of olive groves and vines on limestone soil full of fossils, a landscape that was Etruscan before it was Tuscan and that the travellers of the Grand Tour crossed on the Via Francigena without stopping.
The d’Alessandro family has made wine since the 1980s, when Francesco d’Alessandro was among those who established Syrah in the Cortona area. In 2008 the family moved to Sarteano and changed scale on purpose: a single small vineyard, hand work, certified organic farming, fermentation in concrete and ageing in regenerated barriques, so that the wood accompanies the wine instead of covering it. The estate makes about 5,000 bottles a year in two labels, Scherzo and Quartaluna, both in limited runs. Scherzo takes its name and its label from music, the lively movement of a symphony drawn as a staff; Quartaluna from the rare fourth full moon in a single season, which happened in the estate’s first vintage, with a line from Ariosto on the label.
The house itself is not a restored farmhouse but a piece of contemporary architecture in local stone, wood and natural plaster, with gardens designed as carefully as the rooms, an infinity pool among the olive trees and a kitchen that opens onto a patio of herbs. Francesco’s daughter Elisabetta, a sommelier, now runs the estate alongside him and has pushed its long-standing ties to music and literature towards the visual arts. The idea, in her words, is nourishment for body and spirit together: organic excellence in the glass, beauty in the rooms.
Works in residence, not an exhibition
The collaboration began as a friendship between Elisabetta d’Alessandro and Leonardo Gubbioni, who founded Miura Gallery in 2024 as a fully online gallery, without a fixed exhibition space, dealing in limited editions of contemporary, pop and urban art. The question they set themselves was simple: what happens to an online gallery’s works when they are given a real room to live in, and what happens to a wine estate when art moves in.
The answer is not a show. Two works by Murakami are installed in the interior spaces of the estate for the whole of 2026 and are part of its daily life. There is no exhibition route, no wall label, no opening hours. You come across the works during a stay or during a visit to the cellar, which is by appointment, and you come across them more than once: in the morning on the way to the kitchen, in the evening with a glass of Quartaluna, in different light each time. Terra Quercus becomes, for a year, the physical extension of the gallery, a place where the work is met rather than visited.
No label, no route: the second work in the sitting room. Photo: Alessandro Micarelli
That changes how the work is seen. In a museum the visit has a sequence and a duration; here time does the work of the guide. Attention builds by returning, and the image accumulates in the experience of the house instead of being consumed in one pass. It is a way of living with art that a museum cannot offer and that a kitchen, a cellar and a bedroom make possible without effort.
The garden reflected in the glass of the print. Photo: Alessandro Micarelli
Why Murakami, why here
Murakami’s Superflat is an aesthetic of surface. It takes the flat picture plane of Japanese painting and of anime, removes perspective, and gives everything to the outline and the saturated colour: a flower that smiles with the same intensity in every copy, a skull pattern that reads as decoration until you know what it refers to. It was born in Tokyo out of post-war visual culture, and its brightness sits on top of something dark, the mushrooms that allude to the bomb, the skulls to death, the flowers to feelings pressed flat after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Flowers and skulls, detail. Photo: Alessandro Micarelli
The Val d’Orcia is the opposite proposition. Outside the windows of Terra Quercus everything is depth: the limestone under the vines is millions of years old, the rows of vines and the olive trees set the perspective, the view opens for kilometres towards the valley. The wine is the same idea in a glass, a slow, layered memory of one place that cannot be repeated anywhere else. Hanging Murakami in that house puts two systems of seeing in one room. As we put it when the project opened, Superflat denies depth to exalt the surface, and in doing so it challenges the layered time of farming. The two do not resolve into each other and nothing in the installation asks them to. They look at each other, and the difference between them becomes visible.
There is a quieter link too. Murakami’s flowers grew out of his training in Nihonga, the traditional Japanese painting in which flowers, moon and snow are the great subjects, and out of dozens of failed attempts to paint them in that manner. They are, in their way, a form of respect for nature that has passed through culture, trauma and serial reproduction. The flowers in the garden at Terra Quercus do not smile; they change with the seasons, wither and come back. The same subject, told in two opposite languages, a few metres apart.
How to see the works
The works are on view for the whole of 2026 and can be seen in two ways. Guests staying at Terra Quercus live with them for the length of their stay. Visitors can see them during a tour of the cellar and a tasting of the two wines, which is arranged by appointment directly with the estate. Terra Quercus is about three kilometres from Sarteano and twenty-five from Montepulciano, an hour and a half from Florence and Rome by car, and the visit combines naturally with Pienza, Montalcino and the thermal springs of Bagno Vignoni and San Casciano dei Bagni.
Photo: Alessandro Micarelli
The works are not for sale on site. Anyone who falls for them, or for the other Murakami editions in the gallery’s collection, can contact us directly, and we ship worldwide from Italy.
Miura Gallery on the ground
Miura Gallery was founded in 2024 and works online, with its base in Italy between Bologna and Umbria. We buy Murakami editions in Japan, from Kaikai Kiki’s own shops and from the Japanese secondary market, and sell them to collectors in Europe, North America and Asia. The absence of a shopfront is a choice: it keeps prices close to the market and lets us put the works where people actually live.
Terra Quercus is the first of those places. In Bologna, a selection of Murakami works is on view at Ligera, a restaurant whose kitchen takes the same care with its ingredients that the estate takes with its vines, so that the works can be seen over dinner in the city as well as over a glass in the hills. Both collaborations follow the same idea: a gallery without walls, with its works in rooms where food, wine and daily life happen.
The Terra Quercus project was covered in April 2026 by Elisa Russo, with photographs by Alessandro Micarelli, in a piece on the meeting between Superflat and the Tuscan landscape. Read it in Next Gen Magazine.
Frequently asked questions
Where can I see Takashi Murakami’s work in Tuscany? At Terra Quercus, an organic wine estate near Sarteano in the Val d’Orcia, where two Murakami works are installed for 2026 in partnership with Miura Gallery. They can be seen during a stay or a cellar visit by appointment.
Is it an exhibition? No. The works are installed in the living spaces of the estate, without labels or an exhibition route, and are met during the normal life of the house.
Can I buy the works on view? Not on site. Miura Gallery sells Murakami editions online and ships worldwide; contact us for availability.
Where else does Miura Gallery show works? In Bologna, at the restaurant Ligera, where a selection of Murakami works is on view.
What does Terra Quercus produce? Two organic wines in limited runs, Scherzo and Quartaluna, and olive oil, from seven hectares on limestone soil, about 5,000 bottles a year.
