12 labyrinths and “magical” parks to visit in Italy

The Labirinto della Masone, designed by Franco Maria Ricci with architects Pier Carlo Bontempi and Davide Dutto, is a cultural park with a star-shaped layout that recalls the ideal cities of the Renaissance, amidst esoteric symbolism and a somewhat deadly aura of timelessness. The complex, which covers 7 hectares of land, houses the largest bamboo labyrinth in the world; at the center of the Labyrinth, a porticoed courtyard and a pyramid-shaped chapel, symbol of immutability and perfection, fuel the metaphysical suggestion of the place while in the main body the bookshop and the museum area with the Library and the Archives bear witness to the rich cultural heritage of the creator.

Strolling through the garden of Villa Garzoni is an imaginative and enigmatic experience that casts one into the magic and theatricality of Italian Mannerist and Baroque gardens. A variety of cultivations, an articulated hydraulic system of fountains, waterfalls and streams, a sculptural population that peeps out among the vegetation - or that tends to hide there on purpose on the basis of who knows what lifeblood - suggest that here it is nice to lose the coordinates and abandon oneself to an emotional flow. Like in the arboreal labyrinth formed by boxwood hedges 2-3 meters high, located near the villa known as "delle cento finestre" (of the hundred windows): a typical example of labyrinth with forks, blind alleys and false trails and with an entrance and an exit, from which it is not difficult to get out but where it is nice to think of undertaking, as happened to Pinocchio (we are in Collodi) an initiatory path with a happy ending.

The Castle of Donnafugata, from the aristocratic splendor of the past to the more prosaic cinematographic backdrop of the series about Inspector Montalbano, reserves unexpected surprises thanks to the spectacular architecture not only of the building but also of the 8-hectare park, a sort of "hermetic garden" with temples, artificial caves and a large "blind alley" labyrinth. Differently from the most usual typologies, instead of hedges, the labyrinth is made of dry stone walls and the plan, instead of circular, is trapezoidal, inspired by the London labyrinth of Hampton Court: evidently from Henry VIII to the Sicilian aristocracy the taste to get lost and find oneself in a magic place was a constant.

If monsters live on this earth then they live in the Sacro Bosco di Bomarzo. The site, conceived by Pirro Ligorio to console, among enchantments and magic, the heart of Prince Orsini broken by the death of his wife, hosts a natural park of three hectares where a population of mythological animals, monsters and divinities in basalt with open jaws and contracted gestures reside, according to a scenic fiction - as Bruno Zevi said - so "overwhelming" that one almost wonders if, unseen, these creatures really speak and move. 

Bruno Zevi used to say that Nik Spatari is "one of the very rare cases in which an outsider pours the salt of architecture into the earth". In fact, it is in this way that the artist conceived in 1969, together with Hiske Maas, MuSaBa, a 7 hectares open air park-museum that is a real forge of planning and creativity with the original objective of carrying out initiatives for the promotion of the architectural and environmental heritage of Calabria. In addition to the works created by Spatari himself, in the park and at the ruins of the Carthusian monastery restored inside the park there are about forty works by international contemporary artists, impressive sculptures and colorful buildings. 

Inspired by Gaudi's Parc Güell in Barcelona and by the Bosco di Bomarzo, in 1979 the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle conceived an artistic park immersed in the wild nature of the Maremma, which hosts cyclopean sculptures, 12 to 15 meters high, made of steel and concrete and covered with mirrors, glass and colored ceramics, representing the 22 major arcana of the tarot. Here, guided tours, by the artist's will, are not allowed, in order to leave the possibility of prophecy to anyone who undertakes this hermetic and slightly disturbing journey.

The first Italian museum of environmental art, the complex is a monumental park dedicated to the daring adventures of Pinocchio, narrated and relived in a literal way within a dreamlike and engaging setting that evokes a deep balance between art and nature. Here, strolling through the greenery designed by Piero Porcinai, stopping at the Osteria del Gambero Rosso by Giovanni Michelucci or taking an involuntary dip - as I did - in the Whale tank, you can free your imagination and rediscover that Pascolian "fanciullino" (young boy) that too often lies dormant.

If you are anxious to be observed, this is not your place. The enchanted garden of heads is a surreal and disturbing place that hosts hundreds of tufa sculptures of faces, of every size and expression, made by Filippo Bentivegna, a very particular character with some obsession and no technical mastery. Sad, happy, enigmatic, smiling, thoughtful, angry, bewildered heads, stacked, side by side and two-faced, grouped in clusters as in a votive act: the works acquire the strength of spontaneity and naturalness of art brut that, as Dubuffet said, "arises from the material and feeds on instinctive dispositions”.  

The garden, created at the end of the 19th century by the Luchini family, is a manifesto of the English romantic park, tinged with subtle and obscure symbols. Here a free and sovereign nature dominates and envelops the only traces created by man, from the dry stone walls, to the small stone bridges, to the visible fragments of the past (the remains of a Sienese fort and of a probable Etruscan place of worship). In the middle of the luxuriant nature winds, perceptible only to a few, an initiation-esoteric path of Masonic matrix: so have been conceived the arrangement of some essences in groups of three, symbolic number; the underground jar that recalls the basin of the Temple of Solomon; the box hedge in the shape of a circle that represents the eye that oversees; the pyramid with a triangular base, the main symbol of Massoneria.

In the area of a convent on the Umbrian hills, the Milanese architect Tomaso Buzzi has given life to his "ideal city": a true eschatological allegory of existence narrated through the hermetic language of 18th century Freemasonry. The complex is, as the architect defined it, "an anthology in stone", a great theatrical scenography that legitimizes the recovery of elements of the past: from Hadrian's Villa, to the buildings of the Acropolis, to the Wood of Bomarzo. The design vision implies an initiatory path that unravels among the buildings and represents a confrontation with the Unconscious, according to the model developed by Jung and based on archetypal figures.

In the soft hills of Chianti, a 7-hectare park hosts site-specific contemporary artworks, i.e. works created to be inserted and contextualized exactly in that specific place. The approaches of the artists coming from over 26 countries in the world are among the most varied, from the most traditional language that uses marble and granite, to more unusual forms such as sound or neon lights. All the contributions are, however, under the banner of a common goal: the integration between art and nature, so that each work - placed in its specific space - is an integral part of the environment that surrounds it and in harmony with the others. 

Like the Sculpture Park in Chianti, the Gori Collection - Fattoria di Celle, home to the first private collection of environmental art in Italy, houses in the rooms of the eighteenth-century Fattoria and in its large park open to the public since 1982 site-specific works of art created specifically for these places by major exponents of the contemporary scene, including Robert Morris and Richard Serra. In addition to making the permanent collection visitable, the structure organizes annual exhibitions and performances inside the sculpture-theater.