An urban intervention in a private form, documented in the pages of the artist’s book, Daily Spiritual Life: for nine days at the beginning of the summer of 2000, Maria Dompè transformed the walls of Viale Baccelli, a road that is adjacent to the Baths of Caracalla, into a place of daily ritual, prepared and performed day after day by a series of repeated but never identical acts: the cleaning of the space, the choosing of rocks found at the location, and the arranging of the flowers.

The use of a natural and fragile “material” became the means of a poetic expression of the union between art and space, the choice of different flowers was experienced by the artist as a interior means of getting closer to the place. This ’secret’ intervention, not publicized in any way, was recalled in the words of Maria Dompè: “A place observed by day, searched for at night, niches where day life unites with night life. A ceremony, an offering for nine days, a colloquy with the open space, a silent dialogue with the spirits that inhabit it. A place that whispers of waiting, of putting off until the day after. Ephemeral, universal, ether of flowers, colours of life, one intervention paves the way for another, and together they unite; the cycle of life continues its circle.”

Laura Iamurri