Stepping into the Labyrinth is a journey through Pomodoro’s artistic practice, deeply rooted in the fascination for signs— “especially archaic ones,” he once explained to critic Sandro Parmiggiani. “The impressions I carve into the material—wedges, threads, lacerations—come at their core, from ancient civilizations.” It's no coincidence that visitors are greeted by a rotary press, evoking the artist’s profound connection to matter, or as he calls it, the “buzzing of matter.” It signals a creative process that always begins from the negative—sculpting blocks of clay or earth by hand—and works slowly and laboriously toward the positive form.

The entire piece is made from fiberglass, a material Pomodoro first encountered through his work as a set designer for the theatre. Within the Labyrinth, known and evolving sculptures alternate in a timeless space, where the boundaries between past and present dissolve. Among the highlights is the Tavola della Memoria (1959), here rendered in fiberglass—a kind of primer of the signs and forms central to the artist’s visual language. At the heart of the Labyrinth lies Cagliostro’s Cell, created in 1997 for an exhibition at the fortress of San Leo. Cagliostro, the infamous 18th-century alchemist, was condemned to life in prison by the Catholic Church and died after four years locked in a windowless, doorless cell—faithfully reconstructed by Pomodoro in its original size. Legend has it that Cagliostro wrote a diary page each day during his imprisonment. Though lost, this legacy is reimagined in the surrounding walls with Continuum (2010), a mosaic of miniature written tiles, created with the precision of a mosaicist and the intuition of an alchemist.

More than a self-celebratory monument, the Labyrinth becomes an introspective snapshot of a creative process driven by experimentation—one that makes no claim to absolute truth. Fittingly, one panel is purposefully “flawed,” where the transition from negative to positive has not reached a successful outcome. The signs collapse inward rather than emerging, bearing witness to an artist who, in his tireless search for new codes, has embraced even missteps and mistakes. The journey ends with a sculpture carved in cuttlebone—a technique Pomodoro learned as a young goldsmith’s apprentice in Pesaro.

In continuing the partnership between FENDI and the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation, the reopening of the Labyrinth offers a transformative voyage through the imagination of a true demiurge—an artist who has shaped the world according to his own personal cosmogony.