Artist's Retreat

“Stressful and demanding struggles in defence of the environment and social causes had painfully marked me, both as a man and as an architect and designer.

Pressing circumstances did not allow me to move to distant places.

Perverse in my love of the South, I decided to move even farther south than my “native South”: Lecce.

I needed only a simple, almost ordinary place that would protect me and reunite me with the lost innocence of my origins: a hermit’s home.

Only a very few indispensable things would accompany me to my new dwelling: a few clothes, some of my books and an old red silk blanket.

My mother had given it to me; it had passed from my grandmother to her, and from her to me.

That blanket, with its silver embroidery on a purple ground, by then worn and in tatters,

was to become the “graft stock” for new and naïve furnishings in my hermitage in Lecce.

Cut up, fragmented, reassembled into different pieces, inlaid with sheet metal, ceramic, steel wire, leaves and flowers, it now survives as the house’s only true decoration, in new, unthinkable and unexpected forms: tapestries, lamps, flowers and votive offerings of thanksgiving.”