About

Boccamonte was founded in March 2023 by Maddalena Scarzella and Matteo Petrucci as a space for hospitality and cultural production, set in the houses and landscapes designed by architect Luisa Castiglioni in the 1960s, in the woods above Bocca di Magra, Liguria (Italy).

Conceived by Castiglioni and long animated together with her partner Hans Deichmann, entrepreneur and a significant figure in the fight against fascism in Italy, the site has for over forty years been a meeting place for artists, editors, poets, and friends. Continuing to collect and highlight the rich and multifaceted legacy of this 20th-century architect and designer, Boccamonte has since evolved into a design platform.
Through archival research and a renewed practice of inhabitation, it brings selected works from the Luisa Castiglioni Archive back into production, while developing new designs rooted in the site’s architectural and cultural history. Boccamonte continues to offer hospitality as a space for encounter and cross-disciplinary exchange, in an effort to carry forward the history and energies that have long animated this place.

Luisa Castiglioni

Luisa Castiglioni (Milan, 1922–2015), architect and designer, graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in 1946, one of only five women in her class. She began her career in the studio of Rationalist master Franco Albini, during the dynamic years of Milan’s post-war reconstruction. Together with Albini and Giancarlo De Carlo, she took part in the groundbreaking experience of the 8th Milan Triennale and the QT8 neighborhood. In the 1950s, with Rita Bravi, she co-founded and co-directed one of Italy’s first women-led architectural practices. The work of Luisa Castiglioni and Bravi ranged from interior design to residential buildings, including no fewer than fifteen INA-Casa social housing neighborhoods.

The 1960s marked a crucial phase in the development of Castiglioni’s research, fostered by exchanges and professional collaborations with leading figures of Italian late modernism such as Gae Aulenti and Umberto Riva. The beginning of the decade also saw the start of a fruitful, lifelong partnership with the German anti-fascist entrepreneur Hans Deichmann. Together, they discovered a new, privileged place for living and designing: Bocca di Magra.

On the hilly promontory at the easternmost edge of the Ligurian Levante, Luisa Castiglioni designed a group of holiday houses, nestled in the woods and overlooking the unmistakable profile of the Apuan Alps of Carrara. For over fifty years, the houses of Bocca di Magra were both her home and her permanent workshop, functioning as full-scale prototypes where international references, local materials, and craft techniques were brought into dialogue. - Alessandro Benetti

Houses in Progress

In 2023 Maddalena Scarzella, architect, curator, and Castiglioni’s granddaughter, together with Matteo Petrucci, architect and designer, chose to live in Bocca di Magra, in the houses designed in the 1960s by Luisa Castiglioni, moving beyond a logic of mere preservation and activating new lines of research and design trajectories. Their way of inhabiting takes shape as a continuous practice of observation, contamination, and rewriting, in which the project never settles into a fixed state but reveals itself instead as an open process.

This is how Boccamonte came into being as a platform for hospitality and cultural production. Visions, developments, and changes become tools of everyday knowledge, capable of bringing to light not only the complexity of the architectures themselves, but also the domestic and material universe that sustains their vitality.

The project emerges as an open yet suspended procedure, closer to memory than to definitive form. This is how Luisa Castiglioni always understood architecture, not as a completed outcome, but as a field of possibilities within a space of continual testing. - Davide Fabio Colaci

From the laboratory to the design platform

Today, Boccamonte embraces this legacy through design and cultural expresso. It does not merely preserve architecture and furnishings, but becomes a place capable of transformation through the influences that inhabit and permeate it, where design is understood as an open practice.

"Living and working at Boccamonte means experiencing Luisa Castiglioni’s vision and mindset on a daily basis. From this comes the idea of reactivating design by creating a dialogue between the archive and the present." - Maddalena Scarzella and Matteo Petrucci

The platform aims to:

  • rediscover and produce Luisa Castiglioni’s designs, bringing selected original projects from the Luisa Castiglioni Archive into production to celebrate her cultural legacy
  • develop contemporary design inspired by Boccamonte’s architectural and cultural heritage
  • offer hospitality as opportunities for cross- disciplinary exchange and collaborative creativity
Press

The New York Times, 2026 (Link)
T Magazine México, 2026 (Link)
ELLE Decor, 2026 (Link)
Vogue Italia, 2026 (Link)
Konkeft, 2024 (Link)
AD Italia, 2023 (Link)
AD Germany, 2023 (Link)
AD España, 2023 (Link)

Books

Donne e Progetto, A cura di Caterina Tantillo, Luciano Antonino Scuderi, Simona Gervasio, Marina Lo Re, Quodlibet, 2025 (Link)

Laura May Todd, Italian Interiors: Rooms with a View, Phaeton, 2024 (Link)

Gabriele Neri, Maddalena Scarzella (a cura di), USA 1966, Luisa Castiglioni, Hans Deichmann, Enzo Muzii, Umberto Riva, Humboldt Books, 2023 (Link)

Exhibitions

"Luisa Castiglioni. Houses in Progress", Alcova - Villa Pestarini, Milano Design Week 2026

“Archivio Luisa Castiglioni”, Triennale
di Milano, 2024 (Link)