What is Castello L.J. Bononi at Castiglione del Terziere?
A castle crowning the borgo (village), meticulously and lovingly restored by Loris Jacopo Bononi to serve as a testament to Lunigiana’s past and a spur to ongoing, varied, and energetic cultural activity.
A thrilling repository of artifacts—manuscripts, first printed editions, paintings and sculpture, musical instruments and furnishings dating from the Medieval period onward—which delight the visitor with their beauty and integrity, and which express Bononi’s sophisticated understanding of the complex role that Lunigiana has played in Europe’s history and culture.
An international center for creative exploration and expression—a place where artists, scholars, and professionals from diverse fields and nations can pursue individual and group projects in a setting designed to encourage, aid, enlarge, and fortify their efforts.
A love-poem in stone, written by a man—poet, physician, and businessman—who espoused and enacted a radical freedom of imagination, and trusted that others after him would come to love and respect Castiglione del Terziere and its “castle ‘fortitude’—the fortitude of living alone but together, distant but united.”
The Castello and the borgo form a nodus, a gathering-place, a site for intersections.
Ours is a time of uprooting, Bononi said—a time in which “people are relocated, sent, called elsewhere,” as he wrote. “I, too, emigrated: Rome, Milan, Turin, London, New York. Yet I brought with me an amulet: the secret love for this place.” And so, re-rooting himself in Lunigiana after many years away, Bononi developed his “castle idea,” as he called it.
The castle is both a locus and a concept. A way of thinking about departures and returns, and about what belonging means. Beyond “the vanity of everything,” Bononi wrote upon his return to Lunigiana, “there remains the evidence of so much past and present civiltà .’” And so he aimed to offer examples, in a setting at once historically realistic and beautifully intimate. Following his instincts—sometimes stalking the evidence he sought, sometimes stumbling across it—Bononi assembled a remarkable collection of rare manuscripts, incunabula, cinquecentine, and other books, as well as paintings, sculpture, musical instruments, and rare furnishings and objects from all eras.
Everything Bononi found and brought to his “castle idea” relates directly or indirectly to the history, culture, and people of Lunigiana. And all of it is housed in a structure meticulously restored to showcase its original power, beauty, and endurance.
The Castello and the borgo warmly invite all visitors who are keen to expand Bononi’s vision of a place of important intersections, to pursue their own intellectual and artistic projects, and to relish and share the bounties of Lunigiana.
