As Marco Solari welcomed a group of vacationing families, bikers in full leathers and teenagers with multicoloured hair to La Scarzuola on a brisk spring morning, he issued clear instructions. ‘You have to leave your everyday consciousness at the gate: you’ll need something different inside.’ Set deep in the Umbrian hills, the site is the masterwork of Solari’s uncle, Italian designer Tomaso Buzzi, who purchased the property in 1956, when it consisted of little more than a 13th-century church and convent founded by St Francis of Assisi. As the story goes, St Francis arrived on foot, planted a rosebush and a laurel, and, when water surged forth, took it as a sign of the place’s sacred energies. Named after the scarza plant, a marsh grass St Francis used to build his first shelter there, La Scarzuola is Buzzi’s ideal city, the meeting of an erudite mind and a fertile imagination. Most of it was constructed between 1958 and 1978, and it was completed by Solari after Buzzi’s death in 1981.
According to the Latin motto on the façade of the church, La Scarzuola is an oasis of ‘absolute indulgence, a neo-Mannerist cornucopia of historical references, symbols and arcana sourced from classical civilisations and astrology, alchemy and theology. The bulk of the construction was designed to resemble a ship, aboard which visitors are invited to conduct a metaphorical navigation of the inner self. The belly holds a large amphitheatre with views across the Umbrian hills, the first of seven interconnected stages that proceed through the ‘anthill’, a riotous crowd of iconic buildings, some pristine, others in ruins.
Replicas of the Colosseum and the Acropolis sit cheek by jowl with a triumphal arch, a Tower of Babel and a ‘pyramid’, which is really a fluted spire made of citrine-coloured glass housing a spiral staircase. The figurehead of the vessel is a monumental stone carving of a nude female torso, the standard-bearer for the feminine energy Buzzi felt running through the site. Down a steep hill from the main structure lies an open-air corridor in the image of a sea creature in which, as Solari explains, visitors can experience ‘the dismemberment of the self’, a process recalling the three days and nights of reflection Jonah spent in the belly of the whale, before he was spat out into a new life.
Born in 1900 into a wealthy northern Italian family, Buzzi studied in Milan, where he became close with designers including Gio Ponti – a frequent collaborator – Giuseppe de Finetti and Giovanni Muzio. A central figure in the Milanese Novecento group, Buzzi designed across an impressive range of media, from interiors and furniture to ceramics, lace, lamps and clocks. In 1927, he co-founded Il Labirinto, a furniture company modelled on the Wiener Werkstätte, which realised designs by collective working across the applied arts. When Ponti founded the magazine Domus in 1928, Buzzi contributed articles, including several on garden architecture, a subject that was beginning to pique his interest. His mastery of glassware led to the artistic directorship of the Venini company in Murano from 1932 to 1934, where he created pieces such as ‘Coppa delle Mani’, an exquisite pink bowl held up by a pair of hands adorned with gold bangles and rings, purchased by Benito Mussolini at the Milan Triennial V in 1933.
Beginning in the early 1930s, Buzzi worked on a series of refurbishments and interiors for the Italian upper class. Counts, viscounts, marquises: all clamoured for his services, making him the architect of choice for the nobility, with projects including a villa in Milan for Felice Riva, whose underground swimming pool could be converted into a ballroom and theatre; and, after the end of World War II, the Villa Necchi Campiglio, a fascist-era home whose hard edges Buzzi softened by adding furnishings in the style of Louis XV. During this time, the designer maintained a discreet presence in public life. By 1956, he had renounced the rarefied atmosphere of the aristocracy to retreat into the wilds of his imagination and plan La Scarzuola, which would become his ‘autobiography in stone’.
Buzzi conceived of his ‘Città Buzziana’ as an urban enclosure, whose energy and chaos would be tempered by the tranquillity of its natural surroundings. He built what was before his mind’s eye out of tufa stone from the nearby town of Viterbo. A porous rock produced by precipitations from water, the tufa at La Scarzuola was mostly carved into neat blocks, though some were left rough, giving the sense of an irrepressible life force frothing out of the walls. The esoteric attitude at La Scarzuola was inspired by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), a book attributed to Francesco Colonna. Translated as ‘The Strife of Love in a Dream’, it follows Poliphilo’s romantic pursuit of his love Polia through a dream landscape furnished with all manner of follies. The story was admired by the psychologist Jung, who recognised its dream imagery as a forerunner of his theory of archetypes. It also proffered a new kind of garden, abandoning the hortus conclusus – the enclosed garden that also signified as an emblem for the Virgin Mary – for a more exposed and expressive kind of outdoor space. At La Scarzuola, this evolution rhymes with an overt sensuality, for example, in Buzzi’s interpretation of the tale’s Cemetery of Lost Loves as a reflecting pond whose mirrored surface symbolises the meeting of male and female; or in the walled garden encircling the erect skeleton of a cypress tree, a masculine retort to the feminine figurehead steering the ‘ship’.
As Solari tells it, the entire site is ‘at the service of the psyche; a place to uncover the infinite variations of the Self’. With its emphasis on dreams and symbolism, and its immersion in nature, La Scarzuola resonates with contemporary sensibilities around self-enquiry, secular spirituality and a common desire to envisage new ways of life. As the old falls into ruin and alternatives remain scarcely visible on the horizon, the place offers people a chance to visualise what might come next, to complete Buzzi’s vision in the space of their own imaginations.
La Scarzuola, 05010 Montegabbione, Terni, Italy. For opening times and details visit: lascarzuola.it
A version of this appeared in the July 2022 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
.jpg)
