Grand Hotel Campo dei Fiori The abandoned Art Nouveau jewel, set of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria

Suspiria, the reinterpretation directed by Luca Guadagnino of the classic 1977 horror film by Dario Argento. Among the many secrets hidden in the story of Suzie Bennett (played by Dakota Johnson), American dancer who moved to Europe to follow the dance classes of a prestigious academy that will turn out to be a haunt of witches and occult sciences, there is one very interesting, linked to this mysterious place. Although the film is formally set in the Berlin of the '70s, the location chosen to shoot the scenes inside the Helena Markos Dance Company was actually filmed in Italy at the Grand Hotel Campo dei Fiori. Perched on Mount Tre Croci, a short distance from the center of the city of Varese, the structure, now in a state of neglect, looks like a sleeping giant, the decadent reflection of what, in its golden age, was one of the most beautiful examples of Italian liberty.

The mastery of Inbal Weinberg, production designer of the film and her team transforms the long lost bygone era passed in the monolithic Bauhaus building which houses the dance academy of a vintage Berlin. How? The woman explains it in detail in an interesting interview in The New York Times. She re-elaborates the hotel's ornate interiors, gluing mosaic and floral motifs to make it more minimal, leaving Le Corbusier's sense of simplicity, mixing decorative qualities of 19th-century architecture with 20th-century modernism throughout Europe in a way that recalls Adolf Loos. For example, the Academy's kitchen was designed to have a utilitarian aesthetic, similar to the kitchen created by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926, one of the first mass-produced kitchens produced in series. To see how the hotel's rooms have come back to life, reworked in the lobby, dance studios, offices, kitchen, dormitories of the dancers and in the secret Mutterhaus, you'll have to go to the movies. What we can reveal is only our hope that the hype around an architectural wonder of our forgotten country continues to grow, to produce a real work of restoration.