The luxury of awareness

The one with Sextantio in Santo Stefano in Sessanio has been love at first sight. A small fortified perfectly preserved medieval “borgo”, the majesty and the beauty of the nature of the Gran Sasso Natural Park, the finest conservative renovation of the houses of common people, supported by attentive anthropologic studies to build as truly as possible the life of old times.

The simplicity of the furniture of the past, the mattresses has they were sewed in the ancient times, the soap produced according to the traditional recipes and the colourful hand made blankets, one of the few decoration elements in a space that is at the same time so aerial and intense in its essentiality. Some shops and a couple of laboratories, very few restaurants.

Nevertheless, just after few hours, this place has become for me a pioneering vision of what luxury could be, and could give us.

The dimensions of space and time gain a new different value, of secondary importance, they become unable to set the rhythm of our days and it is easier to get back the present moment. Everything superfluous is minimum and selected, and it gains so itself a renowned and better-defined role, as it is not taken for granted. Focusing on our inner wisdom revives and has less chances of getting lost.

We are all we need, and sometimes our lifestyle overloaded by several inputs, takes us too far away from this vision. Appreciating the commodity of material luxury, looking for the aesthetic gratification brought by art and design, enjoying the easiness of the social relationships that a city offers, using the power of technology, … all this can not distract the attention from the essence of our being.

We live in an era when taking care of our emotional and spiritual dimension is taking, more and more comparing to the recent past, personal responsibility and clear intention; the mechanisms and rhythms of the modern life request to manage huge loads of engagements and activities, with the risk of distracting us from taking care of the more subtle aspects of our existence.

Creating space and chances for their development is our responsibility.

And if a hotel is able to bring us back to this awareness and to remember us to take back our essence, creating the conditions to work on the deepest aspects of our personal and evolutionary development, how can it be defined if not the expression of luxury in its most precious form for us?

 

Photo credits: Sextantio