The Hooks' Adventure Continues!: Celestial and Terrestrial Cities

Tricia and I visited one of the most peculiar places I have seen in Italy, and I just have to share it! It's called La Scarzuola, and is the site of a Franciscan monastery that was co-opted in the 1950s to create a bizarre "ideal" city by the architect Tomaso Buzzi.

You enter the gate of the monastery and find a courtyard with exquisite terra cotta stations of the cross. The older ones were done in 1760, and there are a few newer ones that replace irreparably damaged originals. During the time we waited (there were four others with us), a crush of camper vans pulled up and 3416 people and 98 cranky dogs climbed out. Okay, the numbers may be a bit exaggerated, but it seemed that way.

And we were off! The tour guide actually lives in the facility (presumably in the monastery), and is a distant cousin to the architect. According to him, all the heirs after Buzzi died took a pass on having the property, so he landed with it. His demeanor says otherwise...more that he is smitten with it and has made it his life's work.

Marco, our guide, told us that St. Francis originally came here and built a hut with "scarzo," a type of reed. After a time, a monastery was created with funds from a local count; so it remained for some 500-600 years! The monastery was dissolved and the property sold to Buzzi at some point in the 1950s.

Entry to the well

He started off by doing some (apparently) rather peculiar things in the church (never deconsecrated, it has since been restored to some semblance of normality), and then going about creating a "Renaissance" garden. It has three paths...one symbolizing the path of religion, one the path of the material, and the last the path of love. Supposedly, the only path that leads anywhere is that of love, since the others are a question of blind obedience to externals. Hmm. I wasn't gripped by the logic. Anyway, the garden had a lovely well, so there was that.

Well, well!

The path of love...

The reedy plants in the background are "scarza"

Since the monastery represented the "ideal spiritual city," Buzzi's psychedelic trips led him to conceive of the "ideal material city." It reminded me of the writings of Garcia Marquez or Alice in Wonderland or somethi ng equally strange and unsettling. Marco took great pride in expounding on his cousin's metaphysical theories, but he completely lost me when he declared that plants were better evolved than humans because if we have our heads cut off, we die...and that doesn't happen with people. Um...roots, anyone? I did have to check out mentally, but I did enjoy wandering among the structures. It was interesting to see how everything fitted into the landscape. Some of it was really lovely. Oddly enough, his "ideal material city" includes seven theatres (not sure how these were counted, to tell the truth). This seemed rather peculiar to me, since aren't theatres generally an escape from our real, material world?