Driving for a long time with the summer heat on a dirt road in the middle of the Romagna countryside, between crops as far as the eye can see, you come across an uncultivated grove in the middle of nowhere.

Only approaching further you can see inside the remains of an ancient villa very damaged. The history of the place is obscure to me and inside there is no clue about it. The only obvious signs are the collapses, the result of the various earthquakes that have battered the area several times.

The building was the classic agricultural manor house that dominated all the surrounding plots, on the ground floor many agricultural tools fill some rooms, where the collapses of the upper rooms have not covered with their rubble the rooms below. The ancient beautiful staircase leading to the upper floors has several signs of collapses especially on the marble handrails.

The real protagonist of the structure is the first floor. Both the corridor connecting the rooms and the rooms themselves have beautiful frescoes extremely faded by time and weather.

Climbing plants wrap themselves around the corners of the rooms after making their way through the broken windows. Almost all the floors of the rooms collapsed leaving only large sinkholes in the center. With extreme caution I move in balance with my tripod and camera on the rubble everywhere.

The main room is the one immortalized in the painting: old patterns and frescoes of idealized landscapes on the walls convey the ancient sense of wealth belonged to the family and a fireplace is the last unarmed witness of the ancient destructive collapse, suspended unnaturally in the large central empty space.