A stroll through the narrow, cobbled streets of Solomeo, the small Umbrian hill village that is the base of Italian luxury brand Brunello Cucinelli, will tell you that a sense of place is central to the designer’s philosophy. For the past twenty plus years, while building a global brand, Brunello has also been reviving and transforming the village where his wife was born and he and his family live. While at it, he’s been adding cultural focal points normally associated with towns ten times the size.
The village, which houses within its medieval streets multiple technical and creative departments of the brand, also features a theater, a winery, and a restaurant for staff serving three course lunches for pennies. Nearby, on the plain below the town and not far from the main factory, there’s a meticulously maintained public football pitch and stadium where Brunello, 71, still occasionally plays a robust and (from personal experience somewhat bruising) game of football with lifelong friends. And soon, Brunello will open a library in a 17th century villa close to the old castle where he keeps his office, dedicated to Hadrian and Ptolemy I, jam-packed with the greatest hits of humanist philosophy.
Solomeo, Cucinelli’s HQ.
Early this month Cucinelli received an honorary PhD in architecture from the Department of Architecture at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Naples for his services to town planning and landmark preservation, not just here in Solomeo, but also for the renovations to historic religious and secular buildings at Norcia, the Umbrian town decimated by a major earthquake of 2016 that Brunello regards as his personal spiritual mecca.
Town planning might not sound like the chicest of awards for a lifestyle leader such as Brunello. But for him, Solomeo is a brick-and-mortar manifestation of the humanistic principles he holds dear. Buildings are not architecture, but places where people—his people—live, work, and play.
“Solomeo is a metaphor for how I have developed the brand” he says. “The Roman architect Vitruvius wrote 2,000 years ago that any new building must be solid, useful, and beautiful. That’s pretty much how I think about the company. I sit in my office in the castle here and think not just of my work but also of the hundreds or even thousands of people who have passed through the room with their varied lives and human experiences over many centuries. I’m a custodian who has played a part in recreating and beautifying the humanity of Solomeo.”
Another view of Solomeo.
In 2020, Brunello also unveiled the newly restored Civic Bell Tower of Norcia, which was damaged when a major earthquake struck central Italy in 2016, killing 300 people. Brunello has also funded the restoration the 14th century Cathedral of San Lorenzo and the 18th century Morlacchi Theater, both in the Umbrian capital Perugia.
Rebuilding old buildings is driven, for a committed humanist like Brunello, by a more inspirational craving than civic vanity. It’s clearly an emotional and optimistic response, response to the calamities that can befall towns like Norcia or Solomeo and their inhabitants over long centuries. That sense of continuity is everywhere in Umbria, Brunello’s native region. Known because of its agriculture as “the green heart of Italy,” it’s the country’s most earthy region. Having grown up on a hard-scrabble share-cropping farm without electricity not far from Solomeo, Brunello himself is rooted in Umbria’s rich soil.
Solomeo, which was founded in the 12th century and fortified with a castle in the 14th, is like many small hilltop villages in the region. It is of course picturesque, idyllic even, but it also has an organic rather than planned feel about it.
Cucinelli in Norcia.
“We have developed Solomeo gradually partly because there’s a lot to do and partly because of budget,” he explains. “Also, we want these buildings to last. In 1850, John Ruskin wrote, ‘When you build something, build it for eternity.’ Many contemporary architects seem to create buildings these days with no real reference to their surroundings. There’s a new church built in Assisi—a concrete modernist cube. Why? It’s only ten years old and already it’s falling apart. Our theater was built to last as well as fit in. And it will still be there in 2,000 years, long after I’ve gone. Whenever we build something, first and foremost we listen to the genus loci, the spirit of the place, and build without destroying the identity of the place.”
You won’t, therefore, find a glass-and-steel homage to the future in Solomeo. “When we built the theater” says Brunello, “the architects from the Comune wanted it to be something that looked modern. To me, what we built is modern. It’s functional and adaptable but it is also married to the spirit of the place.”
The Solomeo skyline.
It’s hardly surprising that Brunello prefers seamless integration in architecture over jarring juxtaposition. In his men’s and women’s collections, harmony plays through every facet of the offering and even across the seasons; you can easily wear a jacket from five years ago with this spring’s newest pieces. Things evolve, sure, but they are always familiar too. It’s a recipe that has built a major Italian brand. So why not apply it to buildings too?
“I like the idea of rebuilding to restore the humanity of a place. In Solomeo there’s no reason to build a temple to the brand,” he says. “Instead, we’re creating spaces for dance, theater, swimming, and football, places that are useful and meaningful to the people who come to live and work there. The theater is a temple to the arts, the winery is a temple to the earth. Until the early ‘60s, Solomeo was a center of agricultural production, olive oil, wine, grain. It hasn’t really changed at all. We just added cashmere to the mix.”
Read the full article here
