On the Italian island of Sardinia stands a structure known as La Cupola. When two women saw how deterioration had robbed it of its former beauty, they felt duty-bound to restore it. Rising to the challenge with cleaning implements in hand, they spent days scrubbing and cleaning the ruin—and then vanished.
Who were these two women? What drove them to take action? What did they discover when they did?

Cleaning as Vandalism?

La Cupola is a concrete dome standing on the cliffs at the Costa Paradiso, a formerly off-the-beaten-track area on the Italian island of Sardinia. It was built in the late 1960s by architect Dante Bini as a holiday home for director Michelangelo Antonioni and his lover at the time, actress Monica Vitti. After Antonioni’s death in 2007, the dome’s two new owners had a falling out that resulted in the structure going without maintenance for nearly twenty years, imperilling its very existence. All this came to the media’s attention after Rem Koolhaas, an architect of rare genius and a former journalist himself, publicly declared the structure one of the most significant expressions of residential architecture in the past hundred years. Even with this endorsement, La Cupola did not qualify for inclusion on the Italian heritage list: Its architect is still alive and it has only fifty years of history. Without proper management, the site became a popular tourist destination, and its condition continued to deteriorate—until two women literally rolled up their sleeves and got to work caring for the abandoned structure everyone else had given up on. Their names were Camilla Ginevra and Ashley Helvey, and neither had any existing personal connection to La Cupola.
Italian-born Camilla, who studied architecture at university, was working as a curator and design consultant at the time, while Ashley was a creative director from the US. The two became acquainted through Instagram, and went out for their lunch together after realizing they were both in Marseilles. They established an immediate rapport, recognizing each other as kindred spirits in terms of principles, values, and aesthetics. In no time the two began their activities as Scalzo, a word meaning “barefoot” in Italian. Scalzo’s first initiative: Project Cura (“care” in Italian) at La Cupola.
“La Cupola was known to architecture buffs, of course, but it was famous as a ruin,” says Ashley. “When I made a detour to the site while travelling nearby for a shoot in the summer of 2022, I was shocked by how truly wretched its condition was. The doors were broken so that anyone could have sneaked in. There were needles and bottles all around and animal dung everywhere—it was a rubbish heap. So I contacted Camilla.”
Camilla immediately went to join Ashley on Sardinia.
“My friends and I couldn’t believe it. An architectural masterpiece in a state like that, and no one was taking action! I was hoping to do something myself one day, but I didn’t know what that should be. When Ashley contacted me, I hopped on a boat in the middle of the night. After examining the conditions on-site, we started by visiting the supermarket for supplies! We needed cleaning tools,garbage bags, and—because it was midsummer and there was no running water there—a lot of fluids.”
Both women recall their actions as completely unplanned and spontaneous. What’s more, entering the property without a valid reason could have been illegal trespassing. For the first few days they felt uneasy and tried to stay out of sight as they cleaned. Eventually, though, they started to feel that they were doing the right thing.
“Camilla and I brought our own mattresses and blankets, and sometimes slept surrounded by boars,” says Ashley. “Squatters normally destroy the place they inhabit, but we were trying to improve it with our cleaning. When we thought of it that way, we started to feel that it was okay for us to be there. We could have explained what we were doing there if necessary.”
Even after clearing away mounds of rubbish and scrubbing off layers of grime, the work was far from complete. In the end, Camilla and Ashley spent a total of seven days at La Cupola, divided between two visits in which they reached the site via fifteen-hour boat journey followed by a barefoot run through the forest. When returning from their first visit, they left a notebook so that visitors could record their names, indicating a human presence. The more they cleaned the space that had initially seemed unsuited to human habitation, the more pleasant it became.
“Once we finished the first stage of removing everything unnecessary, we decorated the area by the window where the beds used to be with branches so we could lie down and gaze at the sea, and used stones left scattered on the floor to create sculptures to place on the shelves. We realized that we now had the spare time to customize the space to our liking. If only we’d been making a documentary—it would have been a good record,” laughs Camilla.
“It’s a real shame that we didn’t shoot the site in its original ruined state before starting our work,” adds Ashley. “There’s no record of what we did now.”

Care Leaves No Trace

Sweating in temperatures reaching 36°C, Camilla and Ashley worked intuitively and in silence, with no discussion needed. They had originally envisaged concluding their project with a dinner party to which they would invite guests to celebrate the wonder of the architecture with them, but in the end they realized that would be superfluous. On the last day, the two women ate sea urchin they had dived for themselves, drank wine, looked down at the sea from the cliff, and, as they gazed at the sunset, shared a powerful sense of fulfillment from having finished their act of care.
“It was very physical, and I found it moving to consider that something meaningful was ,” says Camilla. “More than a hundred people had visited before us, and none of them did what we did—there must be a reason for that. Using our efforts, our energies, and our hands to express our affection for this place wasn’t easy, but I think it was a beautiful act.”
Camilla and Ashley performed their work—which could even be called poetic—with such devotion that, when I ask what the hardest part was, they answer, “Closing the door and walking away.” After returning to France, the two of them contacted journalists and architectural experts in an attempt to follow up on their act of preservation, but the complicated tangle of rights involved proved insurmountable.
“We aren’t in a position to effect change. To do that properly, we’d need a group or community of people with various skills who are all oriented toward the same goal and will work with enthusiasm even unpaid.” Many observers praised their endeavour, but the world at large was unsure what to make of something with no hope of profit. Then a surprised but appreciative email from architect Dante Bini arrived. “You surprised me! Your generosity and epidermal sensibility in the forgotten empty space of La Cupola touched me intimately…. But in order for the space to collapse they will have to wait at least another 100 years!,” it read. Though many people had toured, photographed, and written articles about the sturdy structure he designed, he said, none had ever thought to care for it. He was delighted by Camilla and Ashley’s efforts had delighted him. And so events at La Cupola decided the path the two would tread in future.

Camilla Ginevra is a curator, design consultant, and art director from Italy. A passionate horse rider, she lives in Provence with her partner and their two sons. She is currently working on the Scalzo project in collaboration with Ashley Helvey. @camillaginevra_

Ashley Helvey is a creative director from the USA, now based in Paris. She has led editorial projects for numerous brands, mainly within the fashion and advertising industries. She co-founded the monthly magazine MONOGRAM, which highlights one photographer per issue. @ashleyhelvey