What guests
say about us

We are back in Tuscany today. Our meeting was brief and as promised I wanted to describe a little more of our experience of being at the Backstage. It struck us, the space you have created—the sense that it is an art centre that also contains a hotel and a home for people to live within the flame of inspiration. We were reflecting on what made this conceiving so potent, so novel, and it seems that at a fundamental level you are inserting art into every strand of the weave of daily life so that we are reminded that all the details of our regular living have their own poetic rhythms, their incantatory nature. An example of this is that during dinner I went to the toilet (an ordinary action) and on the way I saw the headphones at the balcony and stopped to have a listen: I was transported into the days of creation and suddenly they were all around, part of everything that was happening; as I sat on the purple couch while listening and looking out, I could feel an uncanny expansion of mind. The glass everywhere brings in nature’s art, the sky, the mist hugging the moss hugging the side of the mountain. Then the glass tables, so that different planes of reality look at each other. The exhibition room open at every hour, geometric shapes of wood as further mind expansion and that shot from above the spine that looks like a sacred alchemical city. The moving story of your father by the cinema. I could go on but the point is that from every direction life is being heightened to what it really is... and then in the morning the eternal flame presiding over breakfast. 

I paint and write, mainly from visionary dreams—at the Backstage the dreaming is strong; Marco is a director-writer-actor. We were electrified to be in a place where art is the daily bread. We hope to come again soon and to have longer conversations on all this.

Bountiful blessings to you and your family and the Backstage!