A 20 cm thick bronze ring, 50 cm high and 410 cm in diameter, externally opaque and internally mirror-polished, has this sentence engraved inside: THE VERY STONE ONE KICKS WITH ONE’S BOOT WILL OUTLAST SHAKESPEARE. Taken from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, the work is installed in such a way that it surrounds a piece of a column abandoned in a lawn of the Colosseum Archaeological Park in Rome. The reflecting interior of the sculpture absorbs what is inside it, mirroring it across its entire surface and blending it with Virginia Woolf’s sentence.

The sentence summarizes our relationship with the things that surround us and that existed before us and will survive us, the stratification of time and the multitude of existing times, the time of man lasting only a handful of decades versus the time of stone instead made of eras. In the sentence I can clearly see the relationship we have with inanimate things and that we “use” every day, like a stone we may kick: an object apparently without any importance but which testifies with its resistance over time the indifference of nature towards our passage even when this transforms a stone into a statue or an architecture inevitably destined over time to become ruin and stone again.