Hotels We Like

Million Donkey Hotel

How's this for an intriguing name – Million Donkey Hotel? Even more intriguing is that it's built in a small medieval town in Italy, and it may not even be a hotel. The Million Donkey Hotel was the brainchild of Azione Matese, who invited international artists to the regional park of Matese to work with local residents, and Viennese art collective, feld72, who specialize in finding 'new strategies for cliché-dominated or underestimated (urban) conditions'. So what is it exactly?

The Million Donkey Hotel is located in Prata Sannita, a town at the foot of the Massiccio del Matese. This town is divided into the medieval 'borgo' or Prata Inferiore (which has suffered a great deal from population migration) and the more modern Prata Superiore. The Million Donkey Hotel was conceived as a way of bringing the public back into the older area – a big, diffuse hotel with lots of abandoned spaces where anything and everything is possible. Forty local volunteers worked for a month to turn the ruins into meeting places, bedrooms, siesta spaces and bathrooms that may or may not be used by tourists.

The 'Hotel' currently boasts a green bathroom, a pitch-black room, a silver room, a bar, and a flying bedroom. In the latter, the bed actually rolls on casters from inside the building to a wire cage suspended outside (see picture, top). Why? No idea. Why donkeys? No idea about them either. If anyone can enlighten us, we'd love to know. RM

2007 Dec 4 no responses. share this

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