Termoli: an Italian town you’ve probably never heard of, in a part of Italy you may well never have passed through. Slotted between Abruzzo and Puglia, the region of Molise – Italy’s second-smallest – reaches deep into the peninsula, its Adriatic coastline an agro-industrial plain and its mountainous inner reaches marked by woodland, half-abandoned medieval villages and an ancient Roman settlement. Surrounded by newer, municipal sprawl, Termoli’s borgo antico juts into the sea on a teardrop-shaped promontory, its narrow lanes lined with gaily painted houses; on its lone square is a romanesque cathedral, its façade pockmarked by centuries of salt air.
In the summertime, says Giorgio Pace, the old town is thronged with tourists. But when the co-founder of roaming arts-design festival Nomad and I visit his hometown in spring, the borgo is in hibernation. A chill wind off the Adriatic whistles down crooked streets, some no wider than footpaths, setting the laundry strung high above them billowing and snapping. At night, we’re the only two people out walking.
A fixture on the contemporary arts scene for nearly 20 years, Pace has worked at the Met and the Guggenheim, curated at the Venice Biennale and produced a Rick Owens retrospective in St Moritz. His consultancy, Giorgio Pace Projects, connects luxury brands with arts enterprises worldwide. Bringing provocative culture to unexpected places has become his sought-after stock in trade.
But he’s also a proud Termolese going back generations on both sides of his family; and now his sights are set on the little town he grew up in, with no less ambitious a goal than to make it an international cultural destination. On a square lined with cafés and palm trees in Termoli’s new town, Pace is turning one of two adjacent 19th-century ancestral homes into a private museum. When it opens next year, the Giorgio Pace Foundation will be a dazzling architectural statement by Kengo Kuma, to whom Pace was introduced by the artist and designer Christoph Radl in 2021. Its design will marry striking interventions in glass, bronze and steel with original tile floors across three storeys; the planning-permission gods willing, a fourth floor with an outdoor patio will be added, while the house’s back garden will become a leafy café. Its 16 rooms will showcase a rotation of contemporary artists and creatives.
Pace, however, has brought me to Termoli to see another, even older ancestral home, this one in the centre of the borgo antico. Working with the architect and designer Marco Parmeggiani, he has transformed the first floor of the townhouse into a two-bedroom artists’ residence. Filled with artefacts, antiques, family heirlooms and works from Pace’s own collection, it offers a stay that’s curated in the literal and colloquial senses – a unique aesthetic expression in, and of, Termoli.
“I wanted to make a space where the people who are giving their time and expertise to the museum could be inspired,” says Pace. “Not just artists and architects” – both Kuma and the Albanian artist Adrian Paci, whose work will inaugurate the museum, have stayed in the flat – “but chefs, writers, and musicians.” We are speaking over tea in the residence’s dining room. The 1930s French mahogany table is covered in a blue antique Burmese textile, found on Pace’s travels; the banquette is lined with cushions upholstered in an indigo fabric by London- and Paris-based designer Jennifer Shorto, an old friend.
Pace’s paternal ancestors were gentleman farmers who cultivated wheat for flour and grapes for export. The house, set at the edge of the old town, descends down the rampart wall to the marina below; it appears to have just two storeys from its cobblestoned street entrance, but in fact there are four. “The bottom part of the house was a warehouse in the 18th and 19th centuries,” says Pace. (Today he rents the space to an Irish artist with a passel of friendly dogs.) After the second world war, the goods were moved elsewhere, and the house given to Pace’s father, who later bequeathed it to Pace. He eventually embarked on a full restoration “because I had the idea for the residence already germinating, but also because I needed a place to put all the furniture and art from my flats in London and Paris, which I had sold.
“Marco and I met a long time ago through friends, and he’d always stood out as a talented architect and interior designer,” Pace says of Parmeggiani. “But beyond that, he knows all my stuff, so he was the perfect person to work with me on this.” The brief they set themselves: use every piece of art and furniture from the former houses that would make sense in a coherent whole. “He always talked about it in terms of a sort of retreat,” says Parmeggiani. “The whole ‘dream of Italian travels’, this was also a bit my idea,” Pace interjects. “That historical beauty, what Italy does so well. That’s why the piano is still there,” he adds, indicating a burlwood baby grand – another heirloom – dominating the corner of the sitting room.
“This is a vera casa storica,” Pace continues, pointing out the details. The foundations date back to the early 16th century; the handpainted detailing in the sitting room is 19th-century. A trompe l’oeil fresco on a wall in the ground-floor foyer, depicting an open arch and, beyond, the Adriatic sparkling, is an homage to the actual archway and view that the foyer gave on to before 1992. “The wall was ugly,” Pace laughs. “We had to do something.”
The artist’s residence has been interpreted as “a circular Roman house; a palindrome, including the terrace” – the latter is as wide as the residence itself, and shaded by a Guido Toschi-designed canvas canopy. Wardrobes were removed in both bedrooms, amplifying space. In the master bedroom, the bed is flanked by two of India Mahdavi’s signature Ringo tables; a sea-toned rug by Federica Tondato lies underfoot. The bathroom has been carved out of the bedroom space by half-wall bookcases. Parmeggiani aligned the passage between them with the bathroom’s tall paned window to allow light to pass through. The grey-beige stone that clads the shower is smoothly polished. “The sink is 18th-century, and definitely Molisano, probably used as a washbasin,” says Parmeggiani, pointing out its worn, cratered surface. “But the stone is the same.”
“This borgo is very unique,” says Parmegginani. “It’s almost a discrete promontory from the rest of the town and it’s almost in the sea, like an island,” he notes.
“It made the colours difficult, because they change so much with this light,” says Pace of the decorative challenge. “The master bedroom’s walls, for example, are a sort of military grey, but it shifts tone throughout the day.” He and Parmeggiani had little idea how the deep brown they chose for the guest bedroom would read until it was actually painted. It casts a theatrical but pleasing contrast between walls, original russet tiled floors and the monochrome brocade on the beds.
It all comes to exuberant fruition in the sitting room, where 19th-century colour and design already existed in such abundance that they dictated Pace’s decision to install only black-and-white art. Monumental works by Gianluca Di Pasquale, Alexander Vethers and Charles Avery are displayed “almost as with a cinematic screen”, says Pace, against the ornately frescoed ceilings and panel-painted walls. A Chapter One bookshelf by India Mahdavi is filled with primitive pottery and artefacts from Puglia. Two sofas – one an original Christian Liaigre design, the other by Mahdavi – face each other over a 1950s Danish coffee table; on a third side is an early-
19th-century divan. Covering the original 18th-century flagstone floor is another Federica Tondato rug, this one a riot of colour that’s a modern rhyme with the old walls.
It’s a culmination of Pace’s history, writ large and boldly, in a showplace that plays convincingly the role of a home. Above all, the residence is a very contemporary and sophisticated surprise, here in tiny, uncelebrated Termoli. Which, if Pace has his way, won’t be a valid description for much longer.
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