After leaving Beacon, take Metro-North one stop down to Cold Spring and reserve a seat on the free shuttle to Magazzino Italian Art, an elegant little private museum opened in 2017 by the collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu. Though the exhibition rotates from time to time, the focus is always on the theatrical postwar Italian movement known as Arte Povera.

Luciano Fabro’s 1986 sculpture “Efeso II,” a 1,500-pound slab of white Carrara marble suspended from the ceiling in two loops of steel cable, offers a great introduction to the movement’s approach. Unlike an oil painting, the piece is clearly animated by a singular, somewhat comic idea — in this case, a stone that’s lighter than air. But the same idea, if you get into the spirit of it, could also be a stab at transcendence, and the work’s conceptual impetus doesn’t mean the artist was indifferent to the details of its physical form. On the contrary, one constant running through the works of Fabro, Alighiero Boetti, Mario and Marisa Merz, Jannis Kounellis and the others you’ll see here is a devotion to lush materials: “Yes, yes, it’s art,” you can imagine Fabro saying, “but look at the beauty of the marble!”