Tour d’y voir

The “Tour d’Y voir” is a play on words in French, suggesting both a watchtower and an ivory tower (tour d’ivoire), a symbolic place where the romantic spirit of the artist can find refuge.
It is a design born “in situ” from the interaction between Michel Pena and the location of Radicepura. In his opinion, the “garden” is already there, composed of the surrounding vegetation, of Etna and its majesty, of Taormina and Monte Tauro, of the sea in the background. Here the garden and the landscape make music together, and it is the garden that allows the visitor to hear the sound of the landscape. So, he asked himself how to make people understand all
this, and that’s when the idea of the tower started to take shape in his mind. A vertical garden, which seeks to combine the near and the far, the sensual and the abstract, a double helical ladder to climb and then descend. This “Tour d’Y Voir” literally ‘to see better’ what is farther away, allows us to sense the wind from the sea, to perceive the shadows and the sun and all the world round thanks to this vertiginous situation that almost gives us a sense of imbalance, but the thread does not break because the double helix staircase, invented by Leonardo da Vinci, gently brings us back, as we descend, to the tangible world.