Casa Cugni is the house where my partner, Massimo Branca’s great grandparents used to live. They were farmers, raised animals and lived off the farmland that was attached to this house. Eventually, when the property was passed down to Massimo’s grandfather, he decided to build another house in the middle of the fields and started to live there instead. And so, slowly, Casa Cugni became uninhabited and started to deteriorate.

The walls are made of layers of stone, there’s an ancient oven, a large overgrown backyard, a broken cistern and is the home of mice and a large variety of insects. This ancient house and the surrounding fields now belong to Massimo’s father. The house has been uninhabited for approximately 60 years now and has received no maintenance for about at least 30 years. The fields have also not received any attention for quite a long time and have grown extremely wild.

For you to understand what we have in mind for Casa Cugni, I think you first have to understand who we are. As I’ve written in a previous post, I am a Graphic Designer who grew disenchanted with living in the consumer world (a bit ironic as my job is to design/make products for the consumer world) and decided instead to try a freer way of living supporting myself working as a freelance creative. Massimo is an Anthropologist who works as a documentary photographer and has the inclination to wander around finding stories about alternate, strange ways of living. He is endlessly curious with an insatiable desire to learn.

What we both have in common is that the idea of working in an office/agency/firm 9 hours a day for countless years in a repetitive pattern for the sole purpose of monetary gain is very unsettling. Rather, wouldn’t all the time be better spent learning new skills, new ideas, new beliefs? We will probably end up not having so much money living this way, but hopefully, we’ll have an abundance of knowledge of many different things and stories of many adventures.

With this mindset we arrived at Casa Cugni.

Over the years, Massimo has visited this place multiple times and slowly the idea to make this place habitable has developed.
Nothing fancy, nothing chic, just a place to ‘rest’ in the middle of the countryside.

If you see Casa Cugni, you will understand how beautiful this idea is.
Roots to the past, in a setting that fills your heart with calm.

And so, that’s our goal: make Casa Cugni quasi-livable
(and see what happens along the way)

Sicilian Stories / Musings about Normalcy