In his domain of La Scarzuola, in Umbria, the Italian architect Tomaso Buzzi (1900-1981) gave substance to the matter of dreams. Withdrawn from the world, this representative of the Milanese avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s began the construction of this dreamlike and esoteric complex in 1958 on the grounds of a convent built on the site where, according to tradition, Saint Francis of Assisi would have lived, eight hundred and forty years earlier, in a shelter made of marshy plants (scarza).
The architect, born into a wealthy Lombard family, has taken up residence in this central region of Italy, which borders Tuscany, Marche and Lazio, after a career spent satisfying the desires for beauty of the highest Milanese bourgeoisie. , as an architect, decorator and designer. To the world it serves, thriving in the shadow of Fascism and then in the brilliant post-war years of Italy’s economic miracle, it has helped provide princely homes with clear lines.
However, in his convent, Tomaso Buzzi wants to leave a universe governed by the laws of economic power and the taste of the moment to better embrace a more introspective and spiritual existence. Now an architect for himself – of himself – he radically abandons his avant-garde aesthetics and the purity of his right angles to bring out of the ground a labyrinthine and symbolic world, a reflection of his imagination.
imaginary acropolis
Tomaso Buzzi composes an architectural anthology in seven theatres, covered with occultist motifs and citations to buildings of the past, recalling his vocation as a great collector. We recognize in the tuff of La Scarzuola forms borrowed from the Villa Adriana, built in the 2nd century near Rome, as well as from the neighboring Villa d’Este, a masterpiece of Italian architecture of the Seicento.
Near an ancient theater, Tomaso Buzzi has erected an imaginary acropolis where places and eras are brought together by the artifices of memory. The Parthenon adjoins the Colosseum and the Pantheon, all three dominated by the silhouette of an Italian campanile. The only human form emerging from this labyrinth as deserted as an architectural engraving, a monumental naked bust of a woman stands on the site chosen by Tomaso Buzzi to erect his “temple of Eros”, completed by his nephew and current owner, Marco Solari. At a low point in the garden rises the Tower of Meditation and Solitude, a mock ruin pierced with spiraling openings.
“I have to achieve the fascination of the unfinished which is similar to that of ruins, both of which give architecture this fourth dimension which is time. » This quote attributed to Tomaso Buzzi illustrates the program of a creator who will only give up building his intimate work three years before dying. Inspired by the Italian painters of the 18th century, the architect seems to have seen through the ruins the symbol of a crossing point between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
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