07/09/2026
Some places you visit. Others you wander into and quietly wonder how you’d never heard of them before.
Hidden in the Umbrian hills, in the woods below Montegabbione, La Scarzuola is one of those places.
It began with a thirteenth-century Franciscan convent, bought by architect Tomaso Buzzi in 1956. Over the next twenty years, he transformed the old vegetable garden into his own imagined city……a wonderfully eccentric world of stone theatres, staircases, towers, a ship and fragments of buildings that feel half familiar and half dreamt.
There is something quite magical about walking through it. Nothing is entirely as it seems, and that is rather the point.
After Buzzi died in 1981, his nephew Marco Solari left his life in Milan and came here to continue what his uncle had started, working from the drawings he left behind. He eventually opened La Scarzuola to visitors and, wonderfully, still guides people through it himself.
So you’re not simply wandering around an extraordinary garden. You’re hearing its stories from the person who has spent much of his life bringing it to completion.
It’s strange, beautiful, theatrical and completely unexpected……the sort of place you might never plan a whole trip around, but somehow becomes the part you talk about afterwards ✦
