Beneath Fendi's headquarte in Via Solari 35, Milan, lies a hidden space spanning 170 square meters. But this is no ordinary storage facility or anonymous urban void: it is Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Ingresso nel Labirinto, a monumental environmental sculpture inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh, which reopened to the public on March 20, 2025.
Built between 1995 and 2011, the Labirinto is more than just a testimony to the intimist turn of postmodern sculpture, it is a deeply personal testament to Pomodoro's biographical and artistic reflection, with which he subverts the traditional iconography of the maze. By replacing lush hedgerows with carved incisions, jagged symbols, and fractured surfaces, the artist aimed to create an otherworldly dimension, distant in time and memory, that speaks in a forgotten, enigmatic language, reminiscent of ancient civilizations.
“I have always been fascinated by signs, especially archaic ones,” Pomodoro once told critic Sandro Parmiggiani. “My entrance into the labyrinth is an invitation to wander through a journey where time becomes space, and space, in turn, becomes time”.
Accessible through a monumental gate, the path opens into a dimly lit room featuring an engraved cylinder inspired by Sumerian art. It then unfolds through rooms and surfaces sculpted in bronze, copper, and fiberglass, where the light sharply projects their clear-cut shadows. At the center of the labyrinth, next to an oversized sculpted cuttlebone, lies Pomodoro's reinterpretation of the tomb structure of Count Cagliostro, the Italian adventurer and alchemist who lived in the 18th century.
Along with the reopening of the Labirinto, to celebrate the ongoing collaboration between Fendi and the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation, the Maison hosts two costume-artworks created by Pomodoro in the 1980s in the atrium of Solari 35: the Costume of Dido for Dido, Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe and the Costume of Creon for Oedipus Rex by Igor Stravinsky.
Arnaldo Pomodoro passed away on June 22, 2025, at the age of 98, in his beloved Milan. It is precisely in this city that a subterranean space hides where the giant of Italian sculpture enclosed all his fascinations. It is in the Labirinto by Arnaldo Pomodoro that you must enter to truly understand who was this surveyor who, after arriving in Milan in 1954, would go on to become one of the most influential artists of this century.

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