ASMUNDO DI GISIRA

King Art Room Proserpina

The Eleusinian mysteries were among the most evocative and representative ceremonies of ancient Greece, in them the most significant myth of Proserpina was represented. Proserpina, the beautiful daughter of Demeter, while she was in ecstasy admiring Narcissus on the slopes of Etna, with the terrible and majestic volcano erupting lava, did not notice the arrival of Hades, on a golden chariot pulled by white mares who was ecstatic from her beauty he kidnaps her and takes her with him to the underworld. He makes her by welcoming her with the food of the afterlife: the pomegranate. But on the surface her mother Ceres searches for her and cries for her so desperately that she manages to convince Jupiter to let her return. But Proserpina had already eaten the pomegranate and could no longer reside among the living, Jupiter then decided that for four months of the year she would be the wife of Hades and in the remaining period she would rise to the surface from Demeter, Mother Earth. The art room therefore represents the rebirth of spring, the perennial awakening of the earth and its welling of life. From the entrance you are greeted by a full moon, a globe of light, symbol of the Spring Equinox. On the bathroom wall there is an installation of ceramics by the master Iudici with fractal geometry which reminds us of the always same but always different repetition of spring. And above the wooden jambs, a riot of spring colours, a fresco recalling how Sicily was the granary of the Mediterranean. Where the light always comes from globes of light surrounded by golden reflections that recall how the moon is propitiatory to the golden harvests of spring wheat. Proserpina And here the bedroom opens with the symbolic installation of a barn, its sheaves represented in wooden works always under wooden jambs with the colors of the spring of three hundred years and the Art Nouveau style representation of a fresco on the roof of the myth of Proserpina, who from above gazes in ecstasy at a mirror table that reminds her of Narcissus (but this is another story), supported by the motion of the planets and the alternation of the seasons. But it is from the terrace of the art room among terracotta works by Sicilian artisans and characteristic plants of the Mediterranean scrub that you can fully enjoy the rebirth of spring under the volcano. ​

Gallery