The intervention achieved the goal of redeveloping an important part of the town of Vigonovo by creating a new place for social gathering to complement the historic center.
To bring a place back to life or restore it to its former glory also means to evoke it for what have been its voices, fragments of history, life, daily life, and tradition that can be captured and traced forever on a sheet of paper. And this immense page has become, in the Campiello project, a huge sculpture made up of one hundred and ninety corten steel plates covering an area of over 300 square meters, to be read as a gigantic and enigmatic page of a book. The idea was to reproduce the design of the facade of the 19th-century building, destroyed by fire. One could proceed with a reconstruction, which would have been a fake, or choose, as was done, the path of evocation.
The facade designed by 3ndy studio reproduces the dimensions of the vanished facade, the rhythm of the openings, but also suggests the disposition of the marks of time on the plaster. To complete the facade and make it a unique work, the studio invited the sculptor Giorgio Milani from Piacenza to collaborate, on the suggestion of Philippe Daverio, who is also a key figure in this great artistic operation. Milani has written on this page, enriching it through the filled and empty spaces created by the letters of the alphabet on the corten steel panels. From this comes “Echo of footsteps in memory,” a work of lettering, which in English means “characters,” or a composition of letters and symbols specially chosen by the artist, Giorgio Milani, based on their 19th-century origin (the year to which the construction of the building dates) and their aesthetic appearance, balancing 22 different alphabets, between uppercase and lowercase, in various reinterpretations of “graces and staffs,” creating an aesthetic and cultural harmony.
