It took Napoleon’s failed Egyptian campaign to make the Moorish Revival fashionable in Europe — English travellers broke off the Grand Tour for Andalusia, and capitals from Munich to Sintra sprouted horseshoe arches. The style landed everywhere except Italy, where the new nation’s Risorgimento found its lineage in Greco-Roman culture and treated Arabised notes as foreign eccentricity. Two aristocrats made it their life’s work anyway.

Iván Moure Pazos tours both in a new PDR essay:

  • Rocchetta Mattei — Count Cesare Mattei’s fortress-sanctuary in the Apennines, begun after he watched his mother die slowly in 1850. He withdrew from politics to “free the world from the pain of disease.”
  • Electrohomeopathy — Mattei’s polarity-based medicine, claiming to harness vegetable electricity to balance the circulatory, lymphatic and nervous systems. Delegations spread across Europe and Asia; clients included Tsar Alexander II, Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Queen Victoria. Dostoevsky name-checked him in The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
  • The healing theatre — patients waited in the Sala della Música, then met the count concealed behind a red curtain in the Stanza Rossa. A papier-mâché stalactite ceiling, built from newspaper, filtered his voice into low hypnotic frequencies over the burbling of Moorish fountains; the exit was a psychedelic spiral staircase in yellow, white and black, meant to destabilise the senses on the way out.
  • Sala dei 90 — a room built to host Mattei’s ninetieth-birthday party, under a celestial dome of golden stars. He died of pulmonary disease at eighty-seven in April 1896, and the room is still waiting.
  • Castello di Sammezzano — Marquis Ferdinando Panciatichi, one of the richest men in Tuscany, spent nearly fifty years encasing a 1605 Renaissance villa thirty kilometres from Florence in Persian, Mozarabic and Indian ornament.
  • Built from books — Panciatichi never visited the East, Spain or Portugal. His private library — the seed of the Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze — supplied the sources: Owen Jones’s Alhambra plates, Murphy’s Arabian Antiquities of Spain, Repton’s designs for the Brighton Pavilion. Birds from his ornithological treatises colour the Peacock Room.
  • The inscription — “Thieves and pimps seize and devour Italy, and I do not grieve for this, but because of the evils . . . I believe we have deserved it all.”
  • 365 rooms — a legend, and plainly false. But Sammezzano’s theatrical interiors were used for decades as a film set: gialli, B pictures, erotic horror, plus Pasolini’s Arabian Nights (1974) and Chabrol’s Quiet Days in Clichy (1990).

What the essay keeps circling is that both castles were built against the new nation rather than for it. Mattei distributed his remedies free to patients who could not pay, on what the author calls the socialist principle of universal health care, while fighting allopathic doctors; Panciatichi imported an abstraction that refused Italy’s own figurative tradition, and carved his disgust at the country’s three wars of independence into its walls.

Stone outlasts flesh here. Mattei’s potions and his theory are gone; the Sala dei 90 endures, awaiting a birthday that never arrived, and the fountains are still running. The essay closes on Rilke: “for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.”