The labyrinth of Franco Maria Ricci (photo: Carlo Vannini)
Bambù the terrier makes an excellent guide. He races around on all fours through the labyrinth, and comes back only when his master Franco Maria Ricci whistles for him. Dressed in a beige trench coat and facing an entrance flanked by enormous hedges created from 25 different kinds of “reeds,” Franco Maria Ricci is the owner of this verdant extravaganza. He is 77, but talks and dreams the way a child might, and only turns cynical once: “Do you know why I chose bamboo? Because if I’d built it with boxwood I would have had to wait twenty years to see it finished, and I don’t have that kind of time left.”
It’s a sunny Sunday in the land of the Po River. We’re in Fontanellato, just outside Parma, and the minor roads that crisscross this territory between Via Emilia and the Autostrada del Sole, Italy’s major north-south highway, are practically deserted. Hawks perch on electric pylons, and the broad fields are filled with elegant herons. Here, surrounded by verdure and silence, Ricci has built the largest bamboo labyrinth in the world. A publisher, bibliophile and visionary, Franco Maria Ricci jokes that “right now I’m just the first. And I like that. I built the biggest one, but you realize of course that soon the Chinese will be here…”
Franco Maria Ricci in his library (photo: Andrea Bertolotti)
Before he takes us on a tour of the green maze he brings us into his library, amid marble statues and fragile artworks, as well as walls covered with a collection of 1,100 volumes in Bodoni typeface. I ask him why he built the labyrinth. Ten years ago he first began thinking about it, then with a Voltaire-esque cry of “leave me alone and let me tend my garden!” he sold his publishing house, FMR (which Ricci is now in the process of buying back), gathered funding and set to work.
“It’s difficult,” he says, sporting a brooch made of leather shaped like a rose. “You have to hold fast in order to realize a dream. I got the inspiration from my writer friends Borges and Italo Calvino. The labyrinth is a symbol, a state of beauty.”
“It took a long time. Politicians weren’t that helpful, but –”
Here his wife Laura interrupts him. “Do you know — we get requests for information all the way from Australia, but it seems like here in Italy they don’t care much for what we’re doing.”
VIDEO: Inside the labyrinth
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This post originally appeared on HuffPost Italy and was translated into English.
