Last minute Montegabbione: the Scarzuola, the ideal city of Tommaso Buzzi

The Convent was founded by St. Francis of Assisi in 1218, but very few thing remained of the ancient building before the intervention of restoration of Tommaso Buzzi, one of the maximum exponents in the Italian architecture of the '900s. The actual aspect of the Buzzi's city is entirely owed to the work of the architect that among the years 1960 and 1981 integrally turned the sacred building into a real dense city of quotations and meanings, often of mysterious character, dark and from the special taste. Besides the recovery of the sacred space, constituted by the Franciscan environments, it rises in all of its complexity a profane space, a path through environments and places conceived as suggestive mystical and native itinerary between fantastic images and illegible symbols. The whole city appears as a theatrical machine, inside which find space seven places devoted to the stage art, connected among them from tangled streets and suspended stairways, where all the architectural elements are elaborated to the insignia of a very personal neo-mannerism. Buzzi has succeeded in the admirable enterprise to give body to a dream moving to the reality what appear as a pure birth of the imagination. It's a not-place or a place that only the spirit can perceive it as really, made of allusions, of postpones, of perspectives, something closed in itself, but inevitably open in every direction.

The Castellieri of Montegabbione - Travelling toward Montegabbione is not quite difficult to perceive on the summit of a high ground one of that typical elements of its landscape, the Castellieri...