Before Antonella Cuzzocrea ever had a studio, the idea of making was part of everyday life while growing up. Her parents were endlessly resourceful, sewing clothes, repairing furniture, building lamps, cooking, and working with wood. Nothing was too broken to be repaired or too ordinary to be made by hand.
As a child, she didn’t have a bedroom. She slept on a sofa bed in the living room and retreated to her brother’s room, where she would lie beneath his desk and draw houses on the wood above her—a memory that sparked a desire for a place of her own.
Years later, she was living on the fourth floor of a late 19th-century building in Rome’s Esquilino neighborhood. In 2001, when the owner passed away, she bought the apartment from his nephew, but she was still seeking a retreat.
“I felt a strong need to take up space,” she says. “I dreamed of a sanctuary for the soul where I could listen to myself without interference.”
That sanctuary eventually materialized downstairs when a ground-floor room measuring just 6 by 8 meters (194 square feet) became available to rent. Part of a former doorman’s apartment, it had been left in disrepair by a previous tenant. “It was filthy,” she says. “I cleaned it top to bottom, hired painters, and slowly turned it into my own space.”
The studio was the fulfillment of a dream well over a decade in the making. The late Maria Lai, an esteemed Italian artist, was one of Cuzzocrea’s middle school teachers. She had hoped to follow a similar path, but her father encouraged her to pursue a more practical profession, which led her to languages. During a stay in Paris, however, she found herself cooking for artists and was enthralled by the smell of paint, the atelier's atmosphere, and the people devoted to their craft. “It reawakened a deep desire,” she says.
When she returned to Rome, she began printmaking classes the following day.
For the past 25 years, she’s nurtured that rediscovered calling inside her studio, tucked behind the elevator on the ground floor. The ceilings are high and vaulted, and a window looks out onto a small courtyard with a sink, which she makes use of, as there’s no running water. When she enters in the morning, she notices the light first. For a few hours, the sun remains just out of reach until its rays start to spill across the room. “It’s something that touches me.”
“It has a sacred quality to it,” she says of the studio. “I don't want to exaggerate, but in a sense, it's true. The creative act has its own sanctity, and that’s why I love working in silence and listening, almost as if it were a prayer.”
More than a workspace, the studio is also like a self-portrait. Shelves are lined with antique papers, library index cards, notebooks, and scraps from printmaking experiments. She saves everything because she knows she’ll use it someday–she’s stitched used tea bags into a kimono and repurposed ATAC public transport tickets as a surface for cat sketches.
At the heart of the room is a press from the early- to mid-1900s that she inherited from another artist, a machine “that has a soul". She uses it for all her etching and pressing, which included book-binding projects during her eight-year collaboration with Maison Valentino.
Upstairs, Cuzzocrea's apartment is every bit as personal as her studio, brimming with books, family heirlooms, and objects rescued from the past: an 1824 Patterns for Ladies volume once treasured by her mother; a wooden box filled with loose pages from a 17th-century book waiting to become art; and an 18th-century Latin volume–the first book she ever bound. Even the original 150-year-old floor bears the imprint of a tiny cat's paw, pressed into the tiles long before she moved in. Beyond the apartment, a shared rooftop terrace that she tends to with her neighbors offers another kind of sanctuary. They gather for drinks on summer evenings, and she often begins her day with breakfast overlooking the trees of Piazza Vittorio.
Art isn’t Cuzzocrea's only pursuit. She also teaches English at a nearby school and performs with a local theater association. The studio’s location is crucial as she prefers not to lose time to commuting. It’s a five-minute walk from the school where she teaches, so it’s easy to slip in between work and rehearsals, sometimes just to sit in silence.
"Anyone who visits my home or studio always says, 'You can really feel this is your space,’" she says. “I’ve never thought about what exactly creates that feeling. I believe places absorb the energy of the people who inhabit them. It's a gradual process. The more you live in them, the more they become yours and start speaking for you."
When asked what her studio would say if it could speak, something she’s never considered before, she replies without pause: "Go on."
And she’s done exactly that. This is where she reclaimed her dream of becoming an artist, bound myriad books, and transformed discarded materials into new works.
But “go on” could also be a nudge of encouragement. She spent much of her life afraid to sing in front of others, only to recently stand before an audience of 300 people and perform a lullaby for the first time.
Or maybe she’s being urged toward whatever comes next. After twenty-five years, Cuzzocrea remains profoundly attached to the space she created, yet she often imagines the possibility of another sanctuary: one by the water. Though she has spent her life in Rome, both of her parents came from southern Italy, and she feels the sea summoning her.
On she goes.