The Moorish Fantasies of Cesare Mattei and Ferdinando Panciatichi – The Public Domain Review

As Carlo Menicatti rightly points out, Panciatichi never visited the East, nor even Spain or Portugal, where the Moorish substratum of Europe lies. His travels focused largely around France, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. So what inspired him to create his Castello di Sammezzano? Essentially his private archive – one of the most prestigious in Italy, which sowed the bibliographic seed for today’s Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze. Like a kind of Quixote immersed in oriental texts, Panciatichi dreamed his ideal castle there. He spent most of his time reading, rereading and reinterpreting the works of the great English theorists who wrote about neo-orientalism: Designs for the pavilion in Brighton (1808) by Humphry Repton, The Arab Antiquities of Spain (1815) by James Cavanah Murphy, and esp Plans, elevations, sections and details of the Alhambra (1842) by Owen Jones, which occupied a place of honor in his caliph’s library.