Beautiful design and incredible works of art are a key part of Italy’s cultural heritage but while everyone knows this includes paintings, sculptures, buildings, objects, clothes, and more, some forget that garden design is a key element. Italy’s history of garden design is rich and fascinating and has left us with some truly extraordinary and magical gardens to visit all throughout the country. Varying from pretty and manicured palace gardens, to diverse and educational botanic gardens at universities, to gems specialising in one sort of bloom or tree or plant and presenting a gorgeous array, to flights of fancy featuring interesting planting interacting with wonderful sculptural works, to welcoming parks where generations can gather for fun and excitement; there are all sorts of wonderful gardens in Italy. One of the most unique of all, however, has to be the Labirinto Della Masone, an astonishing and magical garden that is a must-see for all those who find a villa in Emilia Romagna and are interested in such things!
Created by Franco Maria Ricci, an Italian graphic designer, editor, and designer, this extraordinary bamboo maze spreads out over an astounding seven hectares and follows a path that is 3km long in total. Ricci had been long fascinated by mazes and he first dreamed of building one all the way back in the eighties. Following a meeting and collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges, the famous Argentine writer who directed the series La Biblioteca di Babele for Ricci’s publishing house, the idea to make a labyrinth of his own came to Ricci.
Ricci had previously discussed labyrinths with other writers such as Italo Calvino and Roland Barthes and had long been interested in them but Borges was truly obsessed and they turned up in his writing all the time. The discussions between the two maze obsessives in the twenty days that Borges was a guest in Ricci’s home in the eighties was what prompted Ricci to truly consider making a real labyrinth of his own.
Another fortuitous meeting, this time in the early 2000s, with Davide Dutto, a young Turin student of architecture at the time, hastened the project and he used new software to help Ricci design the maze. In 2005, a definitive version of the project was drawn up and imagined a bamboo labyrinth and buildings to house Ricci’s art collection on his estate near Fontanellato in Emilia Romagna. Inspired by labyrinths depicted in two Roman mosaics, one kept at the Bardo Museum and another at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, they designed a maze with traps and crossroads and that was in the shape of an eight-pointed star, reminiscent of fortified cities such as Palmanova and Sabbioneta. Pier Carlo Bontempi, an internationally renowned architect from Parma, was entrusted with the design of the buildings.
That summer, the first bamboos were planted and construction of the buildings began in 2010. In 2015, work was completed on the extraordinary creation and the labyrinth and museum spaces were opened to the public for the first time. It remains a key tourist attraction in the area and was, for a time, the largest maze in the entire globe. This title was lost in 2018 to the Yancheng Dafeng Dream Maze in Yancheng in China but it does retain the title of the biggest bamboo labyrinth in the world. In addition to this, the site is a cultural park that is home to the Ricci art collection, his publishing house, a temporary exhibition hall where various themed art exhibitions take place throughout the year, conference facilities, a concert venue, a gourmet restaurant, and a café – giving visitors even more reason to seek this fascinating gem out if they have found a holiday rental in Emilia Romagna.
Constructed entirely from several different species of bamboo – for which Ricci developed a great passion in his lifetime and which is a plant that is little used in the West but is highly elegant and vigorous – the maze not only provides beauty and entertainment but is made from plants that greatly reduce carbon dioxide and put a considerable amount of oxygen back into the atmosphere.
An ideal place to come and wander about, breathing in the fresh air, enjoying the loveliness of your surroundings, testing yourself with the puzzle of the maze, and making the most of the rest of the facilities on site, this is a charming spot for a day out if you have found a vacation rental in Emilia Romagna and are exploring this amazing part of Italy.