Sammezzano. Il Sogno Orientalista di un Toscano Eccentrico

To explore a region so rich in extraordinary art as Tuscany and fix one's gaze on the Castle of Sammezzano is certainly an absolutely unique experience. What makes it so is the surprising discovery of the unrepeatable ornamental flowering hidden behind the severe outer walls of an authentically fairytale complex dating from the mid-XIX century, product of the will of Marchese Ferdinando Panciatichi Ximenes d'Aragona, both commissioning party and architect. But Sammezzano is not just a sort of reproduction of Granada's Alhambra with its seductive Moorish enchantment, nor does it limit itself to offering a theatrical performance made up of thousands of unexpected decorative inventions room after room. The place is at once cultured and Disneyesque, fascinating and also somehow provocative in the choice of a period and stylistic repertoire so far removed from the chronological reality and life of the person who so passionately desired its creation. This stage for eclecticism and literary and stylistic crosscurrents opens on the dazzling embroidered white of the "Sala degli Amanti" (Room of Lovers) where Gothic and Moorish shapes intertwine. In the rooms to come there is a felicitous explosion, without pause, taking the shape of a chromatic, technical and material phantasmagoria. Rooms, halls, every vestibule and corridor are enlivened by an immense desire for ornamentation that draws lymph from the syntax of the Moorish artistic language. Sammezzano, then, is both dream and nightmare, at once a riveting fiction and historicist accumulation, opulent stage set and wonderful speculative retreat. The amazing whole still today speaks of a proudly personal 'elsewhere' - and the complex, restless, chiaroscuro personality of its creator.