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The labyrinth of Franco Maria Ricci (photo: Carlo Vannini)Bambù the terrier makes an excellent guide. He races around on all fours through the labyrinth, and comes back only when his master Franco Maria Ricci whistles for him. Dressed in a beige trench coat and facing an entrance flanked by enormous hedges created from 25 different kinds of “reeds,” Franco Maria Ricci is the owner of this verdant extravaganza. He is 77, but talks and dreams the way a child might, and only turns cynical once: “Do you know why I chose bamboo? Because if I’d built it with boxwood I would have had to wait twenty years to see it finished, and I don’t have that kind of time left.”It’s a sunny Sunday in the land of the Po River. We’re in Fontanellato, just outside Parma, and the minor roads that crisscross this territory between Via Emilia and the Autostrada del Sole, Italy’s major north-south highway, are practically deserted. Hawks perch on electric pylons, and the broad fields are filled with elegant herons. Here, surrounded by verdure and silence, Ricci has built the largest bamboo labyrinth in the world. A publisher, bibliophile and visionary, Franco Maria Ricci jokes that “right now I’m just the first. And I like that. I built the biggest one, but you realize of course that soon the Chinese will be here…”
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