Italy Grand Tour: the Museum of the Contrada di Valdimontone di Siena

This article is published in number 23 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 8, 2021

In the autumn of 2016 I receive a phone call from the Contrada members – as the members of the contrada are called – of Valdimontone in Siena, who ask me to make a book about their headquarters. I am projected into another world, which I did not know: that of Siena and its palio. Seventeen districts that twice a year, by right or by lottery, according to a complex system of alliances and rivalries, compete in a competition between horses, also assigned by chance, while the jockeys are chosen by the districts.

Each of them therefore has a seat, a place where direct democracy – with a seat like a government – presides over the strategic decisions of the prize. The district of Valdimontone – and I knew this, it was the only thing I knew! – had had the fortunate and enlightened fortune of commissioning its headquarters to one of the most important Italian architects of the twentieth century: Giovanni Michelucci, whose long life – 1881-1990 – almost coincides with the same century. Together with Claudia Conforti and Marzia Marandola, I had written a book about him: this is why the Contrada members had called me.
I arrive in Siena, where I can hardly find and recognize the building I was looking for. An enigmatic, invisible, faceless work, designed by Michelucci, built in a very long time, from 1974 to 1997, and completed after his death, slowly reveals itself to me. Yet it is an architecture that encompasses the architect’s complex itinerary. A space where the paths that project the architectural organism into the city or into the surrounding environment are placed side by side and superimposed on different levels. A place with a social, secular or religious vocation, but always a community one: this is the obsessive idea that pervades Michelucci’s imagination since the beginning of his activity as an architect. Perhaps not everyone knows Michelucci’s masterpieces, but probably, even without knowing it, many have passed them: they walked in the tunnel and along the tracks of the Santa Maria Novella station in Florence (1932-35) or they darted alongside the church of San Giovanni Battista in Campi Bisenzio (1960-64), the famous church on the motorway. In both cases, as in Siena, the idea of ​​an architectural organism calibrated on the dynamics of the paths and their combination becomes clear. Michelucci’s first – and only – design sketch for the new district headquarters, dated October 3, 1974, reaffirms the desire to define a place where functions and paths overlap. And the Pistoian architect’s sketch is so precise that it will be enough to fix its definition in an unequivocal and prophetic way. The new architecture is not visible. It is hidden in the embankment next to an ancient oratory. There is only its internal space, made up of paths and functions that intertwine: the essence of Michelucci’s architecture. My footsteps echo on the aerial walkway that crosses the room. The tangle of paths (and thoughts) unravels driven by Michelucci’s talent for different repetition. Like a Bach fugue.

By Roberto Dulio.

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