He had a particular way of looking at things, even the small ones.
Books, for example, he did not pile—they were arranged. Every object, every image, every word seemed to find with him its exact place, as if it had been waiting for him all along.
We do not know if he was an orderly man—in the strict sense of the word—but he was certainly a man who knew how to choose, and to do so with grace.
He collected beauty, and did so as one tends a garden: with patience, with taste, with a certain gentle severity.
The other, however, did not see.
Yet he spoke as if he carried an infinite archive of images within him.
He knew labyrinths as one knows dreams: without ever seeing them entirely, yet feeling them true in every detail.
He was silent, enigmatic, making every sentence feel like a quotation you had forgotten to remember.
That afternoon, amid the rustle of pages and an air scented with paper and coffee, one of them said:
“Someday, I will build a labyrinth.”
He said it with that lightness dreamers use when promising the impossible.
The other did not answer. But in that silence was a yes, perhaps even a thank you.
And that phrase, spoken almost as a joke, became a promise.
I like to think that the promise made by Franco Maria Ricci, aesthete, collector, and publisher, was not merely an act of affection for his friend, the writer Borges, but a challenge to time.
A declaration of love for getting lost, from a man who in life had always sought the beautiful, the precise, the collected.
And yet, for once, he chose the opposite.
He chose disorientation.
He chose the labyrinth.
It is as if, in that encounter, two extremes of human experience touched:
on one side, the will to order the world, to gather its beauty into visible, composed forms;
on the other, the deep need to get lost, to relinquish control in order to multiply questions.
To become confused. And perhaps, in doing so, to truly know oneself.
A rare gesture, almost untraceable today, in a society that demands transparency, tracking, efficiency.
Where every step is guided, every choice measured, every mistake corrected in real time.
But getting lost is an ancient gesture.
A slow, useless, unproductive act.
And for this reason, profoundly human.
The Labyrinth of Masone is not just a place.
It is the recovery of a forgotten luxury: the luxury of not knowing where you are going.
It is an invitation to slow down, to step out of the flow, to lose oneself.
Because—as Byung-Chul Han writes—speed, hyperconnection, and the absence of obstacles produce only the similar.
It is only by stumbling, taking the wrong path, turning a corner without knowing where it leads, that we can truly encounter the other. And, perhaps, ourselves.
And once truly lost, within that lattice of bamboo and silence, one realizes that the real labyrinth may not be the one built by Ricci.
Perhaps the true maze is the life we live every day: a perpetual race, generation after generation, along paths ever faster, ever more alike.
A trajectory without turns, where we imagine we are moving forward—but perhaps we are merely circling.
There, amid the bamboo grown and nurtured from the humus of a promise between friends, the calm rustle of leaves accompanies thought.
And it prompts the question: what is the true labyrinth?
The one we are crossing, or the one we are living?
And so, to get lost—truly—is not an error.
It is a possibility.
And perhaps, even, a human necessity.
