The compelling beauty and breathtaking setting of many historic southern Italian hill towns, combined with their local traditions, make them an ideal destination for international tourism. For visitors who enjoy their history mixed with a magnificent landscape rich with sights, scents and sounds, the ancient hill towns of the Mediterranean are an ideal destination.
Our approach to conserving the interiors would involve a minimalist approach, using plain furnishing. Often the furniture has been built into the structure to maintain a continuity of form and function with the original building. Given the irregular surfaces, if we introduced free standing furniture it would be unstable, and feel out of context.
Our objective was to make the minimum intervention to the interior, letting the cave interior express itself – so lights were hidden. Where needed, and with reference to the lives once lived in these caves, we used recycled materials to build furniture (cupboards, chairs, desks). Our aim was that the simplicity of form, fusing with the structure, would not interrupt the dramatic setting of the Sassi. We wanted our changes to form a dialogue with the cityscape and its history.