The FMR Labyrinth of ideas

The maze is '' a building built to confuse men "(Jorge Luis Borges).

by Marco Valesi

If we accept the premise that the man step by step, once taken the path ("... caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar ..." said Antonio Machado), continued his journey through broken paths, and lines that, without beginning or end, only asked to be rebuilt or re-drawn and that just walking has been a way to find the world, the other or ourselves, we can not but be strongly attracted to this new space lost in the Parmesan "bass". The Labyrinth of Masone in Fontanellato, strongly desired by the publisher Franco Maria Ricci- "I owed it to my friend Jorge Luis Borges," recalls the parmesan publisher and art director, is in fact an allegory of the world complexity, whose intelligibility is not graspable through reason alone.

And is for those reasons that the forms of the same add up, merge and confuse us: from above resembles a fortress, a throbbing star enclosed by geometries but from other perspectives it seems and it is more than that.

Three kilometers long, the labyrinth hosts the largest bamboo plantation in Europe.

This dream structure is made up of seven hectares of land that were trans-formed in the largest maze in the world, even if the bigger is the desert as the poet Borges lets the King of the Arabs says in The King and the two labyrinths). Its route runs three kilometers long and have been made cultivating about 200 thousand bamboo plants of various species, which now make up the largest plantation in Europe.

The Maze is a multi-faceted and original, starting from the architecture of the entire project. Ricci, with the architects Pier Carlo Bontempi, who performed the buildings, and Davide Dutto, who designed the geometry of the park, has chosen to draw inspiration from the Roman labyrinth, with right angles and division into districts, however, elaborating and introducing here and there small traps: forks and dead ends, spaces of silence and listening.


Inside the park, in addition to the maze, there are cultural areas for more than 5 thousand square meters: the FMR art collection with about 500 works, including paintings and sculptures from the sixteenth to the twentieth century; a library dedicated to typography and graphics, with volumes of Giambattista Bodoni; the entire production of Alberto Tallone and Franco Maria Ricci. And then, an archive of the work of the publishing house in its fifty years of history, and yet, at the center of the maze, a central area of two thousand square meters, rooms for parties and dancing, the square of a village with his church, a lookout tower and finally a pyramid-shaped chapel for weddings.


Walking through the maze becomes a pleasure comparable to that of the Wanderer in the woods and meadows, to that of the flâneur "lost" in the boulevards of Paris but in any case we have to live this dream with the spirit that proposes Scarpa: "Why do you want to fight against the maze? Pander it, for once. Do not worry, let it be the way to decide your own path, and no path to make you choose the streets. Learn to roam, to wander. "


Yes, because the maze of FMR is an ephemeral deep space, made with lucid metaphysics, where is useful to get lost to find themselves!

Info: http://www.labirintodifrancomariaricci.it/

Taste & Knowledge

Recipes in progress
by Alberto Salarelli
A different view
by Manuela Soressi
Landscapes and tastings
by Guido Conti
Good to know
by Davide Bernieri
Unusual meats
by Giovanni Ballarini