Farewell to Franco Maria Ricci, the man of beauty

What is there waiting for you when you finally find the exit of the labyrinth?

Franco Maria Ricci now knows. With his passing, our country has lost a fine intellectual and publisher, a man of deep culture with extraordinary aesthetic taste.

A critic, an eclectic, a fine art editor, and certainly also a passionate collector and intellectual lover of aesthetics and esoterica. All this-and more-was Franco Maria Ricci, who passed away at his home in Fontanellato in the province of Parma, on the edge of his youngest creation: the Labyrinth of the Masone, an incredible universe of bamboo, the largest maze in the world.

Beauty is everywhere and nowhere

In a way I was able to recognize beauty where others did not see it or, rather, did not see it yet, because of a kind of blindness. But beauty is everywhere and nowhere. It is a matter of sucking it up, of making it come up.

Noble, independent, charming, Franco Maria Ricci created the most beautiful books in Italian publishing. And he knew it. Of course, one must have respect for a man who devoted part of his life to printing, in several volumes theEncyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alambert and the other part - since the 1990s - to devising and building a huge labyrinth in bamboo walls.

Encyclopedia and labyrinth: they seem like contradictory concepts for those who ignore that, like the encyclopedia, the labyrinth is an attempt to bag chaos by conjuring it.

I told Jorge Luis Borges that I would build the largest labyrinth in the world. He objected that it already existed; it was the desert.

Innbamboo pays tribute to Franco Maria Ricci, a great connoisseur of beauty in all its forms, a tenacious dreamer, a refined intellectual, but also, simply, a dear friend.

We look forward to seeing you - Saturday, Oct. 3 and Sunday, Oct. 4, 2020 - at the fifth edition of "Under The Bamboo Tree," the market exhibition accompanying the cultural event that will take place at the outdoor areas of the Labirinto della Masone complex.