The title of the work SACRATO revives the archaic form of sagrato (churchyard), the consecrated space that once preceded the entrance to the church. The material used comes from that very place: porphyry blocks from the old churchyard of Sant’Agata, discarded during a renovation and left without function for years. The sculptural gesture arises from this residue and restores dignity to a fragment destined for oblivion.

Porphyry is a compact, resilient volcanic rock, traditionally used in Italy to pave outdoor spaces (squares, streets, churchyards) where its hardness ensured durability over time. These same blocks once paved the space surrounding the church: they were threshold, they were exterior, the ground one crossed before entering.

Placing them today in the nave entails a twofold displacement, from discarded material to sculptural matter and from exterior to interior, carrying with it a sedimented memory: imprinted in the stone, though invisible, are the footsteps of those who for generations crossed that space on their way to the sacred threshold. The work brings that sedimentation of passages back into the place it once only introduced, in a twofold return: of the material, which regains a full place, and of memory, which re-enters from the outside to the inside.

The elements are arranged to cover portions of the floor of the central nave, following the classic technique of laying porphyry in “contrasting arcs” (ad archi contrastanti). Seven blocks are covered in copper leaf, an element whose history is bound up with pivotal moments in human experience: a choice that symbolically elevates their nature and, at the same time, builds a bridge to the wall-mounted work Estinti (Cooksonia), part of the series Estinti (Extinct), made of copper plates etched with the imprints of plant forms that have disappeared from the planet. Cooksonia, among the first vascular land plants, thus establishes an imaginary link between the small, local story of a church closed for over fifty years and the far larger story of the planet we inhabit. The “sacred” evoked from the title onward thus opens onto a further dimension, in a dialogue more intimate and close than one might at first imagine.