Finding the Center

Getting lost is an experience common to all human beings. It’s how we do it that changes over time.

The narrow, poplar-lined road leading to Labirinto della Masone, the world’s largest labyrinth, runs straight across the flat fields, with only a few mild bends. This is a common sight in the Pianura Padana, the vast plain that takes the Po, Italy’s longest river, from the Alps all the way to the Adriatic Sea.

In the fall, the fog gets so thick that people often get lost driving home from work. It is no surprise that Franco Maria Ricci chose this location near the medieval town of Fontanellato to build something that — by definition — is easy to enter, but nearly impossible to exit.

Mr. Ricci — a publisher, designer, book lover and art collector who died last September — was an enigmatic figure in Italian culture. In 1965, he created the publishing house FMR — his initials, and a pun on the French word éphémère (“ephemeral”). Its catalog, specializing in art, design and literature, includes the first edition of the mysterious “Codex Seraphinianus” and possibly all works by the 18th century Italian typographer and printer Giambattista Bodoni, who lent his name to the typography font.

In 1977, Mr. Ricci was working with the author Jorge Luis Borges on curating a book series for FMR when he told the Argentine master that he planned to build a labyrinth. Mr. Borges was knowledgeable on the matter: Many of his short stories, from “The Library of Babel” to “The House of Asterion,” featured a labyrinth, both as a spatial concept and as a philosophical category. He informed Mr. Ricci that a place that is easy to enter but almost impossible to leave did not need to be built; it already existed, and it was called a desert.

But Ricci wasn’t one to give up, so he teamed with the architects Pier Carlo Bontempi and Davide Dutto to design the Labirinto della Masone. The star-shaped complex, which opened in 2015, includes a museum and a library and covers an area of approximately eight hectares, or nearly 20 acres. It contains three kilometers of bamboo-lined, interweaving white paths. It is a popular visitor attraction and a venue for concerts and exhibitions.

I park the car and walk through the tall, red-brick arch into the courtyard, where the cafe and museum are. The woman in the ticket office hands me a map. “A map for a labyrinth?” I ask, skimming over it as I put it in my bag. “Just in case,” she says. “We encourage people not to use it. You should be out in 45 minutes.” I smile and make my way to the entrance.

A Japanese gardener had told Mr. Ricci that, despite being relatively unknown in the Mediterranean, bamboo could thrive in the Po Valley. The plant is resistant to diseases, absorbs a lot of carbon dioxide and does not shed leaves in winter. This is crucial, because see-through walls would make a labyrinth less intriguing and, arguably, purposeless. The Labirinto della Masone is currently home to 200,000 bamboo plants belonging to 20 species. On sweltering days like this one, they create refreshing shade, too.

I’ve been walking for five minutes when I come to a dead end. I’m puzzled. Had I not memorized the way from that cursory look at the map? I sit down on a bench, re-examining the path I’ve walked so far. Voices sound nearby. I’m tempted to follow them back to the right track, but decide to ignore the siren’s call. I came to see the labyrinth alone, and I shall find my own way out. Getting lost, after all, is part of the experience.

Humans have always been attracted to labyrinths. Prehistoric men and women drew labyrinthine shapes: The earliest on record was carved on a mammoth’s horn in modern-day Siberia. Others were engraved on the rocks of the Val Camonica in the Italian Alps, or designed with small pebbles along the coasts of Scandinavia.

That these civilizations are so far apart, both in time and in space, has led archaeologists to assume that each of them came up with the idea independently. If this is true, then the labyrinth must be an archetype of human thought, much like the sphere. A sphere, which has come to be associated with the idea of perfection, always has the same shape, regardless of its size, noted the Italian author Giovanni Mariotti. Labyrinths, on the other hand, vary not only in size, but also in shape, to convey the universal experience of feeling lost. It’s as if a mischievous god kept changing the design so that we — mere mortals — could never learn the way out.

I am roughly a quarter of the way down the path, when three blonde teenagers dressed in white robes pass me in the opposite direction. Is this a sign? Have these celestial beings been sent to guide me out of here? I spot an information stand emerging from the corner between two hedges and approach it, expecting some kind of Alice-in-Wonderland secret passage. Instead, I find a detailed description of the type of bamboo I’m looking at. Disappointed, I keep walking, trusting my instinct to point me in the right direction.

According to the Italian writer and semiologist Umberto Eco, there are three kinds of labyrinths, each with its own design. The first and most famous kind boasts a mythological poster boy: the Minotaur. Legend has it that in the Greek city of Knossos, King Minos ordered Daedalus, his head engineer, to build a labyrinth in which he could hide the Minotaur, the result of a tryst between Minos’s wife and a bull. This type of labyrinth is “unicursal,” because it contained only one path leading from the entrance to the center and back.

Contrary to popular belief, getting lost in this type of labyrinth is virtually impossible. Sure, the spiral path may give a sense of disorientation, but as long as one keeps going, he or she will eventually reach the center. This labyrinth’s path unfolds into a straight line, just like an apparently intricate ball of yarn unfurls in a single thread. That’s why, following the thread Ariadne gave him, Theseus could easily find his way out of the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur. That thread was called a clew, and, according to Merriam-Webster, this use led in turn to the meaning “a piece of evidence that leads one toward the solution of a problem.”

With slight variations, the unicursal labyrinth remained the only type designed throughout Roman and Medieval times. Spiraled designs decorated the floors of churches across Europe, such as Chartres Cathedral in France: Priests and pilgrims would walk the path to the center on their knees, as a form of prayer and penance.

During the Renaissance, the passion for labyrinths re-emerged. Whether circular, square or star-shaped, surrounded by ditches or walls, with a tree or a building in the center, these labyrinths were multicursal, just like the one I’m walking through. Every junction offers a binary choice: left or right. The time it takes to find the only possible way to the center depends on a combination of luck and memory.

I’ve been proceeding on my own, surrounded by a few familiar faces who entered the labyrinth at the same time I did. They are an elegant middle-aged couple, a family with two children running between their parents’ legs and two teenagers, dressed entirely in black, yet clinging to each other — as if walking through a labyrinth was the quintessential romantic endeavor. They are my companions.

We’ve made different choices along the way, but crossed paths time and again, and even covered stretches together, seemingly confirming the theory of the woman at the entrance: However many wrong turns we may take, we’ll be out in 45 minutes. I think of the 18th century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, who first theorized that a labyrinth is a mathematical problem. It’s just a matter of working out the theorem to solve it.

My problem is that, since coming up against a dead end a few aisles ago, I’ve lost sight of my usual companions. I keep bumping into new faces and am beginning to think that I may actually be going backward, even while telling myself that I am advancing.

But is there really a beginning, I wonder? And does it really lead to a center? Another type of labyrinth, according to Mr. Eco, has no entry point, center or circumference. Its junctions are like the nodes of a ginger root: they evolve randomly and lack a precise structure. Each of them can break off anywhere and resprout somewhere else. Or they can connect to any other node in a potentially infinite shape. The internet, Mr. Eco says, is a caricature of it. If the labyrinth is an archetype whose design changes over time, then the ginger root represents how contemporary humans get lost — one link at a time.

I’ve been walking up and down the same lane when I notice a bench in one corner. I stare at it in despair. It’s the one I sat on at the beginning of my journey! My fears weren’t unfounded: As I daydreamed my way through the maze, I got lost and came back to the beginning, or at least to a place that looks a lot like it. Sweat is running down my forehead and my head starts spinning. I have to sit down. I feel cheated. I want to complain to the woman at the ticket office.

My hand reaches for the map in my bag when I see a red butterfly, floating gracefully in front of my eyes. It lingers for a few seconds, as if inviting me to follow. I collect myself, stand up and walk in its direction. The butterfly disappears behind a corner. I do the same and there it is: an ordinary door. The exit.

I check my watch. It’s taken me exactly 42 minutes, not far from what the woman at the entrance had predicted. I open the door and enter the pyramid at the center of the labyrinth. A staircase takes me up to the terrace. From here, I look back at the path I covered over the past three-quarters of an hour. I see groups of people walking along the lanes between the green hedges, like ants inside a seashell.

The metaphor is not mine. In Greek mythology, years after the maze designer Daedalus escaped from imprisonment for having helped King Minos’s wife, the king combed the Mediterranean in search of his rebel builder. Traveling from city to city, he carried with him a coiled shell, offering a generous reward to whoever would be able to draw a thread through it. When Minos arrived in Sicily, King Cocalus passed the challenge on to Daedalus, who was hiding at his court. Daedalus attached a thread to the bottom of an ant and teased it to walk through the spiraling object.

When Cocalus presented Minos with the shell, strung all the way through, Minos knew he had found who he had come looking for.

This article originally appeared in March 2021 on The New York Times.