Lighthouses mark the territory by their presence and guide in the vastness. Beyond their signaling function, headlights appear as true everlasting landmarks registered in the collective memory of people and travelers. The lighthouse offers to be seen, but also to observe facing the sea. Located in romantic territory, away from the world, it allows one to discover the Bel Paese  and contemplate in this wilderness a certain absolute.

Requalification of Murro di Porco  lighthouse is part of an overall consideration on territorial and programmatic purpose headlights and how to maintain and implement their signal function to other areas. We believe that headlights provide the opportunity to create spaces dedicated to introspection, to offer in our hectic society a possibility of self-reflect, a return to oneself to do some soul-searching, detached from troubles. This programmatic regeneration may also be applicable to other lighthouses being part of the « Valore Paese FARI program  » to initiate a kind of secular pilgrimage.

Cape Murro di Porco is defined by a particularly marked and rocky topography, in which we detected a project bearing capacity. In order not to prejudice the lighthouse, we decided not to mask or to extend the existing built heritage, but to be only a terrace on the landscape built along the topography, turning towards the sea. This project emergence from the bedrock tends to maintain a formal purity, revealing by contrast the environment.

The part built is intended to be a reinterpretation of the cloister. It is distributed around an open unifying central space, from which the landscape resurfaces.

The project gets organized around the concept of ambulation and initiatory path; it works in sets of masses, convenient to the internalization and to the introduction of a spiritual climate.

Introspection results in a return to the body, a return to the materiality, architectural space and territory experimentation. It requires creating spaces dedicated to personal or collective experience. Thus we find in the hybridization of the abbey and the lodging of stage, the lighthouse as an entrance, as a threshold, receiving at the same time tourists and also acting as the neuralgic center of the complex.

Once the threshold is crossed, several choices are available: contemplation of the panorama roof offered by the continuous terrace – or the experience of the descent, the course towards the sea seen as a course towards ourselves coming along with stages, the meal, the share, the gathering as much as the care, the bath, but also the rest, the contemplation and with the meditation in a quest of serenity.