Italy’s biggest art project is now a hotel: we spent the night at Pistoletto’s Cittadellarte

“I was looking for a space where I could create a place for activity, a workshop for connecting art and society,” recalls Michelangelo Pistoletto, describing the moment in 1991 when he arrived in Biella and saw, across the Cervo stream, a former textile mill that struck him as “the ideal place” to establish a “city of art.” Pistoletto greets us after parking in the garage and only removes his Panama hat once inside his small house, hidden among the gardens of the Cittadellarte Foundation: a wooden home surrounded by the reflective mirror paintings that made him famous. He changes them constantly — this is clear, since when we visited three years ago, different works were hanging on the walls. Pistoletto is well aware of being constantly observed, even in what should be his private home, and moves almost incognito, shielded by oversized sunglasses. Distance and exposure, like any skilled communicator, are tools he knows how to use very well.

From 1998 to today, inside that former textile factory overlooking the Cervo, the artist behind the “Third Paradise” has built Italy’s largest art-driven urban regeneration project. Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto brings together exhibition spaces, educational programmes, artist residencies, workshops, and research studios focused on architecture, fashion, religion, and social transformation. In 2019 it joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, and this year it adds another piece to its ever-expanding system: a hotel where rooms and shared spaces become exhibition environments. It is called Hotel Cittadellarte.

Hotel Cittadellarte functions as a habitable extension of the foundation and its exhibitions. Thirty-one rooms host thirty-one artworks: the dispersed exhibition L’ospite inatteso (“The Unexpected Guest”) by Abruzzese artist Giuseppe Stampone, curated by Ilaria Bernardi, turns the rooms into an installation centred on themes of hospitality and relations with the Other. Outside, meanwhile, Matteo Raw Tella’s painted interventions reinterpret key symbols of Pistoletto’s universe, from the Third Paradise to the giraffe.

Michelangelo Pistoletto

In the common areas, archival materials and photographs retrace nearly thirty years of the foundation’s history, from the days when Pistoletto arrived with students from the Academy of Vienna and Cittadellarte was still a semi-abandoned factory. “We used to organise performances in this still-unrenovated space,” the artist tells us as we sit with him in the living room. “Then we would have large lunches in the courtyard, using cabbage leaves instead of plates and whatever nature around us provided as ingredients.”

Hotel management has been entrusted to entrepreneur Ugo Pellegrino and his group, already active in restoring other historic buildings in the Biella area. “This isn’t just about running hotel rooms,” Pellegrino explained during the press conference. “You are in a very particular place. If we don’t do this in a special way, we haven’t understood where we are.”

The hotel concept fits perfectly within the theoretical foundations of Cittadellarte, rooted in Pistoletto’s 1960s pamphlet Progetto Arte. Art was meant to return to the centre of society as a connector between different disciplines. Today, hospitality has also become part of that centre: not simply as hotel-style accommodation, but as a way of temporarily entering the foundation’s relational system.

“The hotel is very useful because it allows people to develop a form of tourism that isn’t hit-and-run,” says Pistoletto. “People can come closer, stay, and go deeper.” The hotel is inaugurated during Arte al Centro 2026, the foundation’s long-running annual event now in its 28th edition, alongside the new Cultural Spas (Terme Culturali) conceived by Armona Pistoletto: workshops focused on creative and relational wellbeing through ceramics, photography, graphology, and painting, aimed especially at corporate retreat audiences.

Even the rooms, aligned with four-star standards, make the target audience clear: professionals, companies, collectors, and international visitors. Those willing to pay for an immersive experience inside the “Pistoletto system” — staff explain — are less likely to be locals from Biella and more often German, Chinese, or Japanese guests.

The hotel occupies a building originally constructed in 1874 as an industrial facility, later converted into workers’ housing and now protected as a historic site. The restoration, overseen by the foundation’s architecture office coordinated by Emanuele Bottigella, aimed to preserve the industrial character of the former mill: original lime plaster has been restored, old wooden floors recovered and structurally reinforced to meet seismic standards, while internal insulation uses natural fibres and materials.

Sustainability is also central to the project. During construction, industrial tanks filled with tar were discovered near the chimney. After remediation, they were converted into rainwater collection systems, now reused for irrigation and internal services. Heating is provided by a geothermal system exchanging heat with groundwater, while room carpeting is made from recycled fishing nets recovered from the oceans. More than sixty companies worked on the site, all based in the Biella or Piedmont region.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, 92, will go down in history as one of Italy’s greatest conceptual artists: a leading figure of Arte Povera, a Turin-born and Biella-adopted creator. Yet it is perhaps still underappreciated how, over the years, he has also become a cultural entrepreneur — turning the Third Paradise into a logo, and his art into a branded system.

Nearly thirty years after the foundation’s creation, the project now seems to extend beyond its founder himself. “Cittadellarte is an expansive, co-authored process,” Pistoletto explains. And perhaps the real aim today is what he suggests to visitors: to become, at least for a few days, citizens of Cittadellarte.

An “art hotel” is only the latest step in this transformation. At 92, Pistoletto’s true masterpiece may ultimately be the Pistoletto system itself.

Opening image: Terme culturali, a cura di Armona Pistoletto presso Cittadellarte, Biella. Courtesy Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto