A Visit to the Magical ‘La Scarzuola’
Preamble: Before we embark on the adventure that is La Scarzuola, I recommend you take a moment to indulge in the 28 photos on this page. It would have been entirely in the architect’s spirit to begin our journey with a moment of meditation on that which speaks to us from these images in silence… Go on, immerse yourself in their sun-drenched beauty. I’ll wait for you here meanwhile.
A Phantasmagoria in Stone
In 1957, the much-admired star architect and famous designer, Tomaso Buzzi (1900-1981), withdrew from the public eye. A man who until then had worked exclusively for the high bourgeoisie, renovating their villas and designing their vases, simply disappeared. The real mystery of his life, however, unfolded in the very place to which he withdrew at the age of almost 60 to start a wholly new and entirely phantasmagorical project.
Deep in the Umbrian hills, far from the austerely pruned beauty of Tuscany, where the wilderness still reigns supreme in Italy’s hinterland, lies a former monastery dating back to the 13th century. Legend has it that it was founded on the wanderings of Francis of Assisi, who roamed these wooded hills on his meditations, leaving behind many sacred places where he had sat in contemplation. The hills here are rich in water, which favours life in the wilderness. Legend has it that it was Francis of Assisi who planted a laurel branch and a rose in one such place, whereupon a fresh spring gushed from the very spot. After a first temporary hut was built from the local reed plant (Italian: la scarza), that site developed from a humble hermitage to a small church into a 16th-century monastery, before it was left uninhabited and fell into ruins during the 19th century.
In this completely decayed state, Tomaso Buzzi discovered the remains of the Franciscan monastery. Without further ado he bought all the old estate, the surrounding lands, and began to rebuild the ruins; yet in such a way that they could serve him as a private residence in the future.
Now, of course, we must not imagine this construction work in the 1950s in the farthest hinterland of Umbria as an ordinary building project. Even today, the roads leading to the estate hardly deserve the name: deeply rutted gravel roads that curve dangerously along riverbeds, traverse up hills and slowly wind their way in countless serpentines towards the invisible convent. Any visitor arriving at La Scarzuola today is not only stunned by what they find there but how it actually ever came to be built here. Most of the stones and materials were simply taken from the ruins of the old convent and reworked. However, steel spiral staircases, glass facades, as well as the broad terracing and excavation of the land’s rugged, sloping terrain were not things Buzzi could simply repurpose, but had to make possible at enormous expense. And with seemingly fanatical obsession in the decades to follow his original acquisition.
So, what then is La Scarzuola? A phantasmagoric dreamscape made of imagination turned to stone? A theatre of dreams in the middle of the Umbrian wilderness? The ideal city in miniature? Or the biography of Buzzi himself, carved in stone, from which all his demons and muses grimace and lure and stick their necks out at us? – All this at once, and then one of the best-kept treasures of European occult sights.
Buzzi in his notes describes his Cítta as an “autobiography in stone” and as a place for “music and silence, for greatness and misery, for a social life and a hermitic life of contemplation in solitude, reign of Fantasy, of Fairy Tales, of Myths, of Echoes and Reflections outside of time and space…” Buzzi also informed us that his architectural dreamscape took ample inspiration from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili from 1499. However, this shared love for cryptic beauty and enigmatic forms does not make it easier to decipher the indigenous symbolic language embedded in these marvels of stone.
Finally, the architect had to leave the sprawling project unfinished upon his death in 1981. However, a successor was found in his eccentric nephew, Marco Solari, who still today lives on the site, has completed the construction and renovation work over the last 40 years, and keeps the surrealist theatre in such immaculate condition. Today its perfectly manicured lawns, trimmed roses and swept amphitheatre steps could easily rank among the English Heritage Fund’s finest properties.
In broad outline, La Scarzuola consists of a spacious park and the old monastery that now serves as Mr Solari’s private home. Encamped between the two – and entirely invisible even from a few steps away from it – opens a stately amphitheatre that can hold up to 600 spectators. Although, never ever have so many people been in this remote place at the same time. Thus, in a very literal sense, one is invited to view this amphitheatre as an arena for non-human spectators. But more on this below.
Behind the amphitheatre stretches an elongated pavilion whose roof serves as a stage, which is again flanked by the ensemble’s largest buildings: To its right by an MC Escher-like house dominated by staircases, miniature temples and columns; to its left by a simpler building whose stone walls are adorned with a swarm of large cutout brass-bees and which is aptly titled the Theatre of Bees. Together, these three structures form the perfect setting for the wide open amphitheatre, whose tiers overlook the forests that slope far away in the background.
Adjacent to this centre in the East the Theatrum Mundi expands into a city wall. Following it, one encounters a Gnostic clock tower, a large-breasted Magna Mater cast in concrete, a triangular lotus tower with a door as a constellation of stars, a gate in the shape of a huge fish mouth swallowing the ambler alive, long column-lined colonnades over the sloping hills of forests, as well as the central Temple of Apollo and the Nymphaeum of Diana, a large, black stone pool dotted with flowering water lilies.
This abbreviated list of architectural marvels in La Scarzuola does obviously not include all its components, and it certainly does not address any of the inner construction and meaning of these. As a random example, we are about to omit the approximately three-meter wide altar area carved out of bricks, complete with a black pentagram spanning over its surface, which directly adjoins the Apollo Temple…
A City for the Daemonic
Whoever comes to La Scarzuola will find themselves enchanted. The rationalist will be dizzy from the exorbitant sums of money Buzzi spent to realise this entirely functionless and almost visitor-less dreamscape in stone. After all, nothing is produced here: no theatre plays or orchestra pieces are conducted, the hills haven’t been cultivated to yield wine, the park doesn’t offer greenhouses or herb gardens, and the actual buildings of the complex all stand abandoned and empty. None of this seems to be a chance accident or due to neglect. Rather, the futility and radical self-sufficiency of La Scarzuola seem at the heart of its initial design.
The psychoanalyst then who comes to visit will find themselves likely on the verge of tears and certainly tumbling into teenage regression. Intoxicated by the steep symbolism, they will follow the snaking path of individuation lined with archetypical arcana familiar from writings of the Alchemists, C.G. Jung, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, to name but a few. The romantic, finally, will immediately dream themselves into the living pages of John Fowles’ The Magus. Staying behind the rest of the visitor group, casual cigarette in hand, they sit musing on the stone balustrades of the amphitheatre. Outwardly calm, yet inwardly prepared at any second to see a horned figure or half-naked woman appear in the midday heat… — Only Buzzi himself leaves us with little clue as to what he actually intended to create with this play of dimensions, symbols, scenes, and confrontations in stone. The enigmatic architect remains silent, yet opens the gate into his world, and invites us all in. Each to follow their own path…
It is beyond the pale how little literature, especially outside of Italian, one finds on La Scarzuola to date. A few articles scattered around the internet, a predictable but helpful summary in Psychological Perspectives from 2016, a brief moment of public fame when Gucci shot their 2020 campaign on the estate; then silence again. What Buzzi built and at the same time hid from people seems to have successfully slipped past the perception of the public until now. This makes this abandoned jewel – this one-of-a-kind gem only polished to be abandoned – all the more interesting for all those who like to wander off the beaten track. With this in mind, let us share a few reflections from a decidedly magical perspective.
What strikes us first are echoes of Buzzi’s own biography, which he has immortalised here in stone. How much this successful man must have despaired of the world of his clients and patrons; how shaken he must have been by the horrors and torments of the Second World War that he so uncompromisingly left behind his old life and turned his back on everything. This fact shocks us even more when we walk past the silent buildings charged by the sun: All the attention, the care, the love, the nurturing during Buzzi’s final 30 years was no longer dedicated to the human realm, but to the telluric one alone. What could this man have created, left behind, we ask ourselves as we walk past his concrete Magna Mater, if he only had continued to believe in humans just as much as he did in imagination?
Now, it’s a plain fact that no human being has ever experienced initiation purely because they followed an architecturally prescribed path. The deeper and deeper we wander into Buzzi’s dream world, the clearer this becomes to the viewer: the theatre works, but the magic cannot be so easily forced. The imposing impression, the disturbing and beguiling, is present everywhere on the sprawling estate. But there is no automatism that can take blindness from the eyes of man; that distils lusts and passions to insight and understanding; that clears pathways in the labyrinth; or that lets fears be overcome in a singular confrontation cast in stone. What such a feat would take is not just a backdrop or scenery, but an entire living play. A theatre of cruelty, perhaps? Either way, certainly it would require an invisible, seemingly omnipotent director pulling the strings of experience wherever we set our foot as visitors. Perhaps this then was the one for whose appearance Buzzi wanted to be ready at all costs?
As we walk his estate, Buzzi begins to appear to us as someone who wanted to take back the dream realm by sheer force. As someone who wanted to escape so badly the rupture of the Second World War, the vainness of the bourgeoisie, he put on his very own Icarus wings made of stone. In this respect, La Scarzuola is an unconditionally Promethean adventure, a Luciferian ode to self-empowerment, an evocation of unbridled human imagination and creative freedom. At the same time, this miniature town in the remote Umbrian wilderness can be read as the narcissistic culmination of an entire epoch: The rich ageing male who turns his back on his equally rich friends and patrons, only to burn in the fire of his utterly self-centred vision of fulfilment.
It is good today to contrast the lonely architectural forced march of a Buzzi, for example, with the mago-artistic work of a Gast Bouschet in the Belgian wilderness. Both are radical artists. Both are uncompromising hermits. Both are men in the last third of their lives. And both realise the dream of a landscape into which they interweave themselves with Otherness, into which they embed their biography together with the entirety of the land… One of them worked in stone, the other is still working in his blood, in roots and animal skulls. One created a stage complete with temple pillars to transfix the heavenly lights into the spirit of man; the other slides on his knees into the chthonic underworld, himself riddled with verses and bugs.
The truly revolutionary, cruelly important question that La Scarzuola holds for us today is what use can such a place still have? In a world without glaciers but with wars, with oceans full of plastic but without fish, with capitalism that has become parasitic to man, just as man has become parasitic to this world – in such a world, can we still afford places like La Scarzuola? Can we take the liberty of dreams of such grandiose, boundless, exuberant wildness and costliness? More importantly, in such a world, does the stone theatre of Signor Buzzi still work, or did it ever work? Does this place touch, does it alter our consciousness, does it shift our human emotional topography as we circumambulate its mythical topography?
It turns out that these are precisely the wrong kind of questions if we dared to look at La Scarzuola from a standpoint of Radical Otherness.
If this was our intention, we would have to abandon all man-made agendas to break its unproductive silence. We would have to cease all colonial efforts to seize its wilderness. Or to coax from the mouths of its stone monsters the precious alchemical elixir that can sublimate our own biography… From a standpoint of Radical Otherness, this Theatrum Mundi is neither a surreal stage, nor a path of individuation carved out of stone, nor the product of an architectural mid-life crisis thrown into the remote Umbrian mountains. From the perspective of Radical Otherness, La Scarzuola is not for humans at all.
Allow me to expand: In Western magic, the idea of a temple, paraphernalia or talisman essentially is that a portable object or physical space has been conditioned in such a way that it now can be inhabited and used in a dual manner: from one side by human and from the other by non-humans agents – be they goddesses, daemons, or the spirits of the deceased. Indeed, such two-sided objects and loci may play the central role in the Western culture of magic: think of shrines, the relics of saints, wands of fire, chalices of water, the pentacles of the four cardinal points, etc. All these places know two sides and at least two actors: humans and non-humans, who in a joint act generate magical impact. However, this apparent balance is deceptive. In practice, both sides are expected to serve the human agenda alone. This becomes even more extreme when we enter the realm of Depth-psychology: Here, the living counterpart has gone entirely lost. Now the whole world is declared an altar of symbols that cast its iridescent lights back on the mind of the beholder.
Perhaps the central difference between La Scarzuola and all other ancient ruins or now abandoned sites once built for large auditoriums is that Buzzi’s magical place was built from the outset for abandonment. That is, for the abandonment by humans.
Just as an empty stage is never truly empty, so it is with all the two-sided objects we just described: they all continue to be visited, explored, animated, and used by their non-human inhabitants even after humans have long since lost interest in them.
For a moment then, imagine a whole miniature Cítte in the middle of an inhospitable wilderness built only for the spirits. Imagine an amphitheatre for daemons on which the wind performs its plays, day and night. Imagine a pool of Diane for the nymphs, eternally undisturbed by human hands, a sacred tree surrounded by a four-metre-high circular wall only for the living light of Apollo to constantly refract between bark, stone and sky...
We have no indication that such was Buzzi’s intention for building La Scarzuola, but undoubtedly it was the reality he created. A jinn-city where the human and the non-human mingle on the altar of fantasy. An eternal performance, an open stage, a richly laden table set for the inhabitants of the wild Italian hinterland who do not walk on material legs. An ode – or perhaps a conjuration? – in stone to the mythical landscape and its inhabitants.
From such a perspective, the last thing a place like La Scarzuola needs to do is to make sense. Instead, it simply has to be there. Today and tomorrow and still the day after tomorrow. Unchanged, well-preserved, cherished, not for the heels, laces, and fine fabrics of the Bourgeoisie, but for all the presences from far below and high above and in their midst.
La Scarzuola can be visited upon request during regular guided walking groups. Limited space is available; thus prior booking is required. The tours are held in Italian language only. The place itself speaks no human language at all.
