Stefano Boeri at the Frankfurter Buchmesse Guest of Honor Italy pavilion created by Stefano Boeri Interiors. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Johannes Minkus
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘A Really Extraordinary Common Thread’
It takes Stefano Boeri only a moment to decide where to start in discussing his Guest of Honor Italy pavilion at Frankfurter Buchmesse.“Unpredictability,” he says. “We could start by saying that the most important characteristic of the European square, the Italian square, is unpredictability.”
And that, in fact, he says with a wry smile, is why when you visit the Forum here at Frankfurt to see the pavilion, you’ll find yourself in a piazza. It’s Boeri’s way of capturing the unpredictability of life.
“Within the four sides, the four façades, of a piazza, anything can happen. A political demonstration. A religious procession. A popular fiesta, a concert, a crime, a love scene—all the ordinary flow of life.” With a wry smile, he adds, “I think we’re quite obsessed by the idea of piazza—by the concept of a square in all our works.”
Were you to ask a man or woman in Milan what they know about their native son Boeri—architect, urban planning professor, and a determined steward of the environment—that person would most likely point upward and say Bosco Verticale, the Boeri Studio’s 2014 “Vertical Forest,” now a decade-old icon of Boeri’s metropolitan ingenuity. Architectural book specialists know this project as well as those Milanese do, in part thanks to its image on the cover of Ben Wilson’s Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City (Penguin Random House, March 2023).
And while there are related variations of these intriguing “living building” projects from Stefano Boeri Architetti—from Dubai to Guizhou and from Shanghai to Firenze—the heart of this man rest most easily under a Campari umbrella in a piazza. And thinking of that space, the public square, he flashes a smile when a reporter mentions to him “the Vespa view” of Italy—the fact that visitors from other nations are always captivated by contemporary Italian mix of ancient and modern worlds, from Fabius to Fellini.
“I believe that,” Boeri says: “There are elements of continuity in the history of European cities, and in particular in the history of Italian cities. And so if we just go back to the Roman Forum or imagine also how in the Medieval period squares were subdivided into civil, religious, and commercial, we see those three main functions redefined in the Renaissance period in relation to the idea of perspective,” which many credit to a predecessor of Boeri, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi.
‘The Unpredictable Desire of Each Individual Visitor’
In the central piazza of Stefano Boeri’s Guest of Honor Italy pavilion at Frankfurter Buchmesse 2024. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Talita Faccini
By the 19th century, the public square had something to say about the growing value placed on mobility, which makes sense if you know the pleasure of getting around that piazza when the city’s promenade begins each evening in Taormina over the Ionian sea and the square is a place in which it’s important to touch each other, to feel the press of the crowd in “a place completely open and left to the unpredictable desire of each individual visitor.
“No matter where you are,’ in a piazza, ‘you feel yourself in a place where you can do what you want with other people. In a way, it’s so democratic.”Stefano Boeri
“So certainly,” Boeri says, “the square represents a really extraordinary common thread that links the ancient history of our cities to the present and the future of our urban communities.”
Be sure to note the columns standing around you in Boeri’s piazza at Frankfurt. “We have worked a lot on columns” for the pavilion, Boeri tells Publishing Perspectives. “We have 33 columns, four meters high, and they’re divided into five families: Doric columns; Ionic columns; Corinthian columns; Venetian columns; and twisted columns.”
Around the Italian pavilion’s piazza and those columns, doors open into the many exhibitions that ring this small “city’s” piazza—including, Machiavelli500; another called Under an Ancient Sky: Pompeii Between Past and Present; another titled Venice International University: Manuzio and the Book Revolution. There also are two auditorium spaces and more, created by Boeri and his studio team, all of them aware of how much weary Frankfurt visitors may find a piazza awaiting them with seats for rest.
Frankfurt, Italy, Nepal: The Piazza
An image from Stefano Boeri Architetti of the project at earthquake-wracked Amatrice. Image: Stefano Boeri Architetti
In addition to Frankfurter Buchmesse’s Italian pavilion piazza, Boeri says two others currently have special meaning for him.
One is in Amatrice, a beautiful town in the Latium Apennines that was hit by 6.2-magnitude earthquake and at least seven aftershocks in 2016, reportedly leaving some 300 people dead and centuries of buildings in rubble. Boeri was one of the architects who worked to assist the town in rebuilding. He gave them the Amatrice Piazza del Gusto, Tradizione e Solidarieta, in the form of an major piazza, a communal space, a refectory enclosed and safe, its warm woods and slanted roofs sheltering eight of the restaurants and the school canteen that had been destroyed in the quake when it leveled three-quarters of the town.
In describing it, Boeri wrote, “A square. A place in which to eat local food specialties, by all means. But also a place to meet up, to play, and to stay together, in a multifunctional covered space, with an enormous glass wall with a view of the mountains,” the Monti della Laga. On August 24 of this year, Amatrice reached the eighth anniversary of that catastrophe. “And for me,” Boeri says, “that was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had in my career,” one that has proven to him the essential importance of creating a community space where people could feel themselves still surrounded by life.”
And the other special piazza he tells us about “is in Nepal, a huge square” with “a meadow 6oo meters in diameter.”
A rendering of the Ramagrama Stupa Lumbini project in Nepal — a piazza at the scale of faith. Image: Stefano Boeri Architetti
This is the jaw-dropping Ramagrama Stupa Lumbini project, a Buddhist landmark of international prominence in western Nepal’s Parasi district on the Jharahi River, 50 kilometers east of the tradition’s birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. The Stupa itself is, in essence, a green mound topped by a Bodhi Tree—the last site conceived as holding Buddha’s relics intact.
That “Peace Meadow” holding the sacred fig tree is surrounded by concentric gardens, “Biodiversity Rings” featuring 80,000 plants of 70 species. A center for prayer, meditation, and peace is designed to use local materials, Indigenous brick production, and low environmental impact. Responsive to UNESCO World Heritage Sites’ requirements, the Ramagrama Stupa Lunbini is a massive living mandala and destination for millions of monks and others annually.
In interview, the anticipation of opening the Guest of Honor Italy pavilion’s piazza returns now, but it’s easy to see that Boeri has been touched by the spirituality and grace of the place of his new project in Nepal, still underway, dated for last year and this year. And maybe Taormina has lingered in the mind, too. We muse on the idea of Frankfurt’s trade visitors coming together in a sunset piazza, strolling, talking.
“It works so well,” he says, “because it’s something that is communicated by the people. Immediately you enter in a piazza, and you are in a piazza. No matter where you are, you feel yourself in a place where you can do what you want with other people. In a way, it’s so democratic. The Agora at Messe Frankfurt of course recalls the Greek original, which Boeri muses, “was the beginning of everything. The beginning of democracy.
“And that’s it,” Stefano Boeri says.
“We are still there.”
Our 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair Magazine, currently being read at Frankfurter Buchmesse by trade visitors, now is available in a digital edition here. This interview is a part of the magazine’s focal section on this year’s Italian guest of honor program.
Guest of Honor Italy is showcasing its publishers and authors on multiple stands at honor year in 2025 with programming and a large delegation of authors and publishers, and Frankfurt’s 2025 guest of honor, the Philippines, has begun its programming.
You’ll also read our focused coverage of issues and events in the Guest of Honor Italy program; book market trends in Brazil, France, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, and Poland; thoughts on the international rights trade from Matthes & Seitz Berlin’s Meran Mentzel; commentary from independent publishers from Greece, Colombia, and Kenya; PEN International president emerita Jennifer Clement on censorship ahead of the IPA’s International Publishers Congress; an exit interview with the outgoing IPA president Karine Pansa of Brazil; an interview with Scholastic chief Peter Warwick; expert views on audio in Italy from Mondadori’s Miriam Spinnato; and more.
More from Publishing Perspectives on Italy and its book publishing industry is here, and more on the Italian Publishers Association (AIE) is here. More on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here, more on its guest of honor program is here, and more on Guest of Honor Italy 2024 is here.