Living in the archetypal cave

By Valerio Paolo Mosco - 1 October 2024
Miele, Mitsubishi Electric have participated in the project

In a superb movie by Pedro Almodóvar, a poor family moves into a cave. The woman character, magnificently played by Penélope Cruz, cleverly turns an inhospitable place into a warm, welcoming, even poetic home. Her young son is fascinated by his mother’s ability to transform this space where the light, streaming in from above onto the white lime plastered walls, highlights the colored furnishings she has put together.

The cave, of course, is where architecture all began, the oldest refuge of man and beast. Architects Francesca Capitani and Marco Lanzetta – Studio LaCap – have restructured one on the Italian island of Ventotene, turning it into a piece of architecture. With a surface area of some 160 sq. m, the cave reaches far back into the sloping terrain. A huge opening in the ceiling floods everything with light just as in Almodóvar’s magical movie. This particular cave had been used since time immemorial: first a refuge, then as a storage space, then lived in, only to be finally abandoned. Today, it is once again a home. Unobtrusively, even delicately, set into the slope, it has been equally discreetly turned into a living space by the architects.

From the outside, you are met with an ample, vomitorium-like, glazed entrance at the end of a terraced area whose furniture provides a foretaste of what is within. Inside, the all-enveloping white of every surface lends the cave’s natural asperities an artificial softness. An ingenious system was used to secure the cave walls. Ventotene is made mostly of unstable sandy rock and earth infills, making cave stability an extremely critical issue. Fundamental consolidation work was therefore required. This was largely carried out from the outside. The cave walls were completely clad in finely-spaced electro-welded steel mesh, reinforced with sprayed concrete, and then painted white. The result was a skeleton-like covering of the whole cave...