Roccamare – Castiglione della Pescaia, Tuscany

It may sound impossible, but there is a direct connection between the Roccamare pine forest and Moscow – at least, for myself and architect Geert Koster there is one. We designed together several villas and gardens for Russian clients, under the lovely Maremma pine forest facing the sea. Roccamare is a private compound designed in the 1950s by architect Ugo Miglietta, that comprises more than 200 modernist villas built from 1963 onwards. This exclusive place was home to intellectuals and writers including Piero Citati and Carlo Fruttero, who set his Enigma in luogo di mare thriller here, or Italo Calvino who took inspiration from the beaches at Roccamare when writing his Palomar. Roccamare does not have earth, just sand, there is very little water and tall pines cast a thick shadow, marking the whole compound, from the entrance gate to the last dune on the beach. Despite this, the spontaneous vegetation is extremely beautiful and fragrant: there are large mastic and juniper bushes, and carpets of Cistus and wild rosemary that – due to the site’s soil and climate features – may take on a lot of diverse colour hues, from white to indigo. Indeed, the plant that really gave me thrills when I discovered it was the sweet-perfumed Daphne sericea, that looks like rhododendron and is absolutely untainted by sun and salt. The key word in these exclusive projects was showing off, a shared passion of our clients, and thus: fully furnished swimming pools, well-cared paving, and arbours. However, what really intrigued us was studying how to obtain gardens fit for a dry environment that can successfully blend in the spontaneous vegetation discreetly and in keeping with the park’s rules; whenever engaging in landscaping, our main concern is respecting the environment, and we pursue it single-mindedly. The architecture is designed by Geert Koster.