Monte San Savino 2024

The Monte San Savino Show has always been held on the second weekend in November. This means that everyone books their accommodation a year in advance. I’m fairly risk-averse, though, so I refuse to book anything (especially a villa in Tuscany with a non-refundable deposit) until the dates are confirmed. In 2024, my paranoia was justified – Monte was to be on the third weekend in November. Imagine my schadenfreude as I watched Facebook meltdown in a torrent of indignation. I gleefully hopped over to my preferred villa provider and attempted to book my preferred villa.

It was already booked out.

This is how we ended up staying in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t quite nowhere – it was that awkward distance from Monte that’s sort of there but mostly just a little too far away to be useful. Two miles isn’t a massive distance, but there are hills and the weather is unpleasant. Thankfully, Martin’s surgery earlier in the year meant he hardly drinks at all and thus promised to drive us around. I suppose that makes up for it all.

For 2025, I’ll be aiming to snag the better villa that’s only 250m from the town centre, but I’ll probably be gazumped again because I will not be fooled into booking before the dates are finalised.

Our trip to Monte this year was also a tale of collecting strays. We’ve been gradually adding to our menagerie each year, and this year we ended up rescuing a sculptor at the last minute. Ari, it seems, had booked a villa 15 miles away from Monte and had no form of transport. Taxis do not seem to exist in rural Tuscany (who would have thought?), and I suspect Uber and its ilk haven’t yet penetrated that far into the countryside. We’d had a last-minute cancellation, however, which meant we had some space.

I should add a warning here for anyone who hasn’t been to Monte yet and plans on staying in a villa: bring warmer clothes than you expect. And maybe extra blankets. And a heater. The villas charge an extortionate rate for heating, and the size and structure of the buildings mean that it’s almost pointless even trying to heat them. I have high tolerance for the cold, but most people don’t. It’s really fucking cold in those places.

Anyway, on with the report.

It has been brought to my attention that the photos I provided for my last review (Scale Model Challenge) weren’t entirely incompetent. There was suspicion I’d upgraded my tools. I trust that you, my readers, will be comforted to see that my photography is, once again, absolute dogshit.

Just for a change – and because I’m sure everyone is quite sick of me talking about storytelling and narrative devices – I thought I’d instead discuss a few pieces that really stood out for me. I’ll probably end up discussing them in terms of narrative and all that, but I guess if you’ve read this far and made it through my atrocious photography, then you’re probably invested and will tolerate it.

Habitat, by Maren Wolff (work in progress)

While this isn’t finished, I was really taken by it. It’s a great exercise in composition and worldbuilding – the little details already start to tell you about the lives of the inhabitants, and the little nods to real-world architecture help cement those ideas. It’s quite obvious that this isn’t a difficult thing to build – it’s a few blocks and some basic shapes glued together – but the eye to compose them and to manage the level of detail is excellent.

I think seeing this as a WIP also helps expose the creativity in action; sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of a modeller’s creative vision when it’s a finished work, because it’s unclear how much of the composition is actually their own work and not that of the sculptor.

Saturn Devouring His Son, by Francesca Ranucci

Now, I often see sculptors recreating works by artists and get a little bored – we don’t need more nude warrior women, and I don’t want to see yet another model painted to be viewed from only the one angle that the original painting presented the view from.

On the other hand, Goya is a pretty special artist, and the style of the painting really doesn’t lend itself to being converted into a ‘realistic’ three-dimensional figure, and that’s what made this stand out for me. Being able to take a Vallejo, Brom, Frazetta, Ferri, etc. and turn it into a model is one thing; being able to interpret the emotion and torment of Goya’s masterpiece and render that in three dimensions is quite another. I think so, anyway.

I should see if I can get a copy in 1/72 scale.

Dioramas by Michael Volquarts

Michael actually had dioramas all over the place – it’s really his specialty. The thing I always like about his work is that he eschews military topics to focus on really lovely, quiet scenes – there’s no excessive drama (or melodrama), just a moment that’s often quite relatable. He also seems to have an unending supply of pigeons, which is pretty great.

Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette, Vogue Cover September 2006, by Gabi Tysarzik

I mean, obviously. More of this sort of thing, please, and less of the endless “Sergeant Wilberforce Gravebottomly IV, Battle of Cudgington Meadows, November 13th 1729, 4:28pm”.

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Monte was, once again, an enjoyable experience, and it continues to evolve in small ways. One of this year’s evolutions that may not have been as popular was the decision to move the prize giving outdoors. There’s obviously a risk with that: it’s mid-November, so it’s cold and there’s a decent chance of rain. However, the number of attendees now means that the theatre where the prize giving was traditionally held is no longer large enough (to be fair, it probably hasn’t been large enough for a number of years). I’m not sure if there are any other spaces of suitable size for the future, or if the show will have to continue gambling on the weather.

So, while the weather was fine and the prize giving went off largely without a hitch, there was no guarantee this would be the case – I’ll be interested to see how they deal with continued growth in the future, as FMS may need to face a similar challenge at some point.

As to the subject of the prize giving, the Ely crew did admirably:

• Kev: silver in standard storytelling, bronzes in standard historical and fantasy painting.
• Joey: silver in masters historical painting and bronze in masters sci-fi converted.
• Martin: silver in masters storytelling, bronzes in masters historical and fantasy painting.
• Fet: silver in masters storytelling.

I was also pretty pleased to be told by Roman Lappat that I just barely missed out on the Massive Voodoo prize for creativity, which is very cool.

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To address the elephant-sized burger in the room, the most amazing burgers in the world are no more. Last year, we discovered that the takeaway pizza place just outside the city walls actually did incredible burgers – I had a Toulouse sausage one that blew my mind. Sadly, it seems that the restaurant passed into new hands since then and now the specialty is lasagne. I have nothing against lasagne, but I had been eager to have another burger.

Also lasagnes have a tendency to hide mushrooms, which is just perverse.