NWE Signatures, LLC
Writing, Designing, and Production of Books and Corporate Documents
La Scarzuola
There is no way to describe in words what you are about to see. We drove through twisted mountain roads, sometimes with only one lane, up switchbacks and down into a remote area of Umbria. Then we turned onto a gravel road that was no more than two tracks in the dirt to drive 7 more kilometers. When we reached La Scarzuola, we prowled around the perimeter because all gates were locked tight. Finally a man came to the front gate and asked if we wanted a tour. He charged us 10 Euros each and guided us around this incredible Art Deco garden for two hours. It was simply a step across the barrier between worlds into a universe that only existed in the minds of Friar Colona (15th century) and the Milanese architect Tomas Buzzi (1957).
"This Franciscan convent, founded in 1218 by St. Francis of Assisi who planted here a bush of bay and roses and caused a spring to gush forth, owes its name to a marsh plant, the Scarza, which the Saint used to build himself a shelter. The apse of the church still bears an early thirteenth century fresco depicting the Saint in levitation.
"In 1956, the convent complex was acquired by the Milanese architect Tomaso Buzzi (1900-1981). Between 1958 and 1978, he planned and erected his own Ideal City beside the convent, envisaged as a "theatrical machine." Buzzi's city, including as many as 7 theatres, culminates in the Acropolis, a piled-up wealth of buildings comprising numerous archetypes, empty inside and provided with as many compartments as a termites' nest, which provide many surprising vistas. An iniziatic relationship is thus established between the convent (the sacred city) and the theatre buildings (the profane city), both laden with symbols and secrets, references and quotations.
Inspired by Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Polyphili (1499), the style that best interprets the licence of this design is neo-mannerism: stairs used in all directions, th edeliberate disproportion of some parts, a few monsters, the heaping together of buildings and monuments, amounting to surrealism, something of the labyrinth, something evocative, geometric, astronomic, magic."
