The abandoned village of Castiglioncello di Firenzuola is the ideal place for an artist who wants to find inspiration and find himself through meditation and silence. Having to design a place for art, music and literature, the design concept is based on the poetics of the great writer Luigi Pirandello who deals with the metaphor of the mask. According to him every man has infinite faces: his own face, the one he thinks he has and the one he shows to the society. Starting from this assumption, the project becomes the representation of this contradiction and therefore the ruins that characterize the village show their own deterioration but, at the same time, a golden mask seeks a sort of completeness creating a new face, visible to everybody. Moreover, below the ruins, the ateliers of literature are obtained through an excavation and this represents the will to move away from the surface in search of one’s own interiority.

The geometries and the axiality of the elements that compose the existing village become the guideline for adding the volumes needed to accomplish all the functions of the project. The new volumes, in fact, are dimensioned on the existing buildings and the openings in the walls allow to frame the landscape. The village, through the new project, is divided into public parts and in more private parts and useful in searching for inspiration for the artists: the two extremes of the village are characterized by one completely public and the other one completely isolated. The design additions include ateliers for the artists, an exhibition gallery created among the ruins through the addition of a big but essential common roof, the squares for cultural and social exchange and, finally, a large circular void excavated into the ground that constitutes the silence hall in which anyone can isolate himself concentrating only on himself and on the surrounding nature.