Ajadi Bushaj and Pietro Frazzei

How did your story begin?
Ajadi / My story has always been, in a certain way, a story of greenery. Or perhaps, more precisely, it is the story of gradually realising that greenery has always been there. Many of my happiest memories, in fact, take the shape, smell, or colour of a plant: playing in Albania with snails in the shade of a vine, the sweet scent of elderflower while I was taking my first kicks at a football with my cousins, or the dense tunnels of cherry laurel I would pass through like secret passages. As a child, I spent a lot of time observing trees and constantly asking questions about how they lived, about what happened in their silent time.
I also remember a curious belief I had when walking in parks: I was convinced that they had existed before cities, and that settlements had only come later, built all around them, leaving those fragments of nature free to continue existing. Over time I understood that this was not the case, but that image continued to shape my gaze. Even today, when I design, I often return to that simple idea: imagining greenery that makes space for the city, rather than a city that merely tolerates greenery at its edges.
Curiosity became a conscious passion many years later, when I was living in Brasília. It was there that I understood that greenery could be conceived and designed, that behind every garden there is an act of imagination and responsibility. In asking myself how I might do it, I recognised something familiar: the possibility of transforming a sensitivity born among trees into a way of seeing and shaping the world.

Pietro / As a child, after school, my afternoons were spent in Valle Santa Croce, in a park not far from home. To my eyes it was an enchanted place: a small world where I could play at being Indians, explore hidden paths, and quietly observe the animals of the land and water. On weekends, I would instead follow my grandfather to his orchard, which he had named Settimino. Walking among the trees, he taught me the names of plants, the patient work of the land, and the ancient rhythm of the seasons, with their slow and continuous metamorphoses that transform the landscape.
Growing up in this way, in daily closeness to what we call “nature,” I discovered the deep joy of working with the living elements of gardens.

How do you imagine your “mental landscape” when you create? Are there any real or imaginary places that guide you?
Ajadi / One of the real places that most often emerges when I imagine my “mental landscape” is the garden behind my family’s summer house in Albania. In front of the house there is a tended, orderly garden: my father regularly cuts the grass, arranges the plants, keeps everything in balance. Behind it, however, the garden grows freely. The grass is tall and the plants intermingle. When I think of my mental landscape, I often return to that space at the back: a rebellious refuge, a garden that does not try to dominate nature but to coexist with its more unruly energy.

Pietro / My mental landscape is a border territory, a fluid ecosystem where geological memory meets pure imagination. When I create, I do not see static images but flows of energy and composing structures: I am guided above all by direct experience of the real places I pass through—fragments of landscapes I have visited, from which I draw an emotion, a scent, or a tactile memory. Among imaginary places, my mind inhabits the vegetation-reclaimed cities of Studio Ghibli, where greenery is not decoration but a force that heals the wounds of concrete. It is a landscape where technology yields to organic beauty. For me, creating means immersing myself in this “fertile fracture,” seeking to translate that sense of peace and mystery into tangible spaces.