Monte San Savino Show is a Painting Competition held in a small village in Tuscany, Italy called Monte San Savino. Two Thin Coats went back in November 2025 to hand out our Best Vignette award.
The historic village of Monte San Savino is situated on a hill with wonderful views of Tuscany all around, and itself is filled with amazing historical architecture.
Whilst the village itself is beautiful the art that goes on display at the Monte San Savino Show is the real star. Some of the best painters from all over the world go to Monte to celebrate each others work and catch up with friends they’ve made.
The pieces themselves are separated into categories and each category is given its own area within one of Monte San Savino’s historic civic buildings.
Here are some closeups of some of our favorite pieces.
Now for the Best Vignette award.
This award is designed to allow us to celebrate work that we think the entire piece really speaks to us, be that the the painting, the conversions and the overall feel of the piece.
As you can see even from the small selection in the gallery above there were A LOT of awesome candidates but ultimately Sam chose the following piece:
This piece by Francesco Olivieri really stood out, the blue is so vibrant it draws attention from across the room and once you start looking closer at the entire scene you start noticing all the little details. The freehand on the banner and the Non Metallic Metal across the entire piece is also really nice.
It won Gold in the Fantasy Masters Category so clearly the judges agreed too!
You can see this piece and more of Francesco’s awesome work on his instagram: knightincantorpainting
Congratulations Francesco!
We’re also celebrating our friend Alex Dos Santos’ who came with us to Monte last year he claimed Gold in the Masters Fantasy category this year with this lovely piece:
The colour palette used here is lovely, and makes for a really wonderful piece. You can see more at Alexdoesminis on instagram.
Well done to Francesco and Alex, and congratulations to all the winners at the show, the quality was extremely high, and all of the awards were well deserved.
– Sam