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A Labyrinth to Get Lost In Star-Shaped Bamboo Forest Built Around 2,000-sq. Meter Piazza07-16-15 | News

A Labyrinth to Get Lost In Star-Shaped Bamboo Forest Built Around 2,000-sq. Meter Piazza

The Masone Labyrinth is a cultural park created by publisher Franco Maria Ricci, along with architects Pier Carlo Bontempi and Davide Dutto at his country house in Fontanellato near Parma, Italy. The park has nearly 2 miles of paths running through a forest of 200,000 bamboo plants of different varieties, some as tall as 16 feet.

Italian art publisher Franco Maria Ricci, 77, has built what's being called the "world's largest" labyrinth. The Masone Labyrinth is a star-shaped bamboo forest built around a 2,000-square-meter piazza with structures that house Ricci's art collection"?usome 500 artworks from the 1500s through the 1900s, a library with 15,000 volumes on typography and graphic design, a chapel in the shape of a pyramid, convention areas, dance hall, bookshop, a bistro, a restaurant and rooms for overnight stays.

The $11 million project open to the public at the end of May.

Ricci has thought about building a labyrinth for decades, tracing his motivation for such a project to his former friend Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), the noted Argentine short-story writer, essayist and poet. Borges had a fascination for labyrinths, and thought of them as a metaphor for the human condition.

Historically, labyrinths have taken three forms: ancient Crete favored seven spirals; the single-path Roman labyrinths had right-angle turns and were divided into four interconnecting labyrinths; and the Christian labyrinth, as seen at Chartres, France, had 11 spirals. Ricci's inspiration was the Roman labyrinth, but he incorporated blind alleys, which were not used in the single-path Roman labyrinths.