La Casa Di Cini Boeri

When I graduated, there were only two other women in my course. It was a closed world, dominated by men, but I never thought I had to ask for permission to be there.
(Cini Boeri)

The documentary unfolds along two parallel lines: on one hand, external memory — witnesses, friends, colleagues, archives, interviews; on the other, the less familiar voice of Cini Boeri herself, emerging through dialogues and archival footage. This dual register is essential: it’s not merely about recounting something, but about allowing subjectivity to resonate — to convey not only facts, but the way those facts were perceived and lived.

The montage of places — the Milan apartment in Piazza Sant’Ambrogio, the round house and the bunker house in La Maddalena, the house in the woods among the birches — creates an intimate geography that connects to objects, furniture, and projects: a domesticated yet radical architecture, an object that inhabits, welcomes, surprises. In this sense, design becomes a political gesture: the home is not just a refuge, but an act of rebellion against spatial austerity, against the rigidity of bourgeois interiors.

Cini Boeri is not only an architect; she is a pioneer who crosses the century as a political subject. A daughter of an era in which the domestic, social, and academic rules of life were rigidly dictated by men, she managed to carve out a place for herself, creating spaces that defied the norm and enabled autonomy. The documentary emphasizes this: the breaking of prejudice, the tension between the collective and the individual, the home not as a fixed wall but as an open horizon of freedom.

There is also an implicit reflection on historical times: Fascist Milan, the postwar years, the economic boom, the cultural and social ferment. Within this context, Boeri emerges as someone who “creates space” where space was not conceived for her — and she does so not by asking for permission, but by designing.

A key element is the genealogical tree that forms the emotional and moral backdrop of the story. Maria Cristina Mariani Dameno (Cini) was born in a Milan already known as a city of “knowledge” and transformation. Her father, Renato Boeri, was a neurologist and partisan; her grandfather, a member of the Action Party — a political lineage that shaped a deeply democratic sensibility. Her marriage and her children — Sandro, Stefano, Tito — are not secondary figures: they are not only witnesses but participants in the narrative, guardians of memory.

The family does not appear as a nostalgic refuge, but as a place of conflict, choice, and daily life lived with ethical urgency. Boeri keeps her surname even when her marriage fades, and this choice speaks of dignity, of a refusal to yield, of a desire to be recognized and to preserve her identity.

Among the objects that stand out are the Serpentone sofa, the Bobo armchair, the Papero and Lucetta lamps, the Strips, the Pecorelle, the Botolo. They are not mere furniture pieces: they are manifestos for a more human, fluid, and free domestic life. Her architectural works, too — connected by their relationship with landscape and nature, such as the bunker house on the rocks of La Maddalena or the house that curves around trees — testify to a vision in which architecture does not dominate but enters into dialogue.

Cini Boeri’s House is a cultural artifact of high intensity. It does not merely celebrate: it questions. It does not simply showcase houses, objects, and successes: it asks what it means to dwell, to exist, to design — in the tension between individual freedom and social responsibility. Cini Boeri emerges as a thinker of space, an architect of freedom.

Architecture is particularly difficult for women — and there’s no reason it should be. I don’t want to blame men or society, but for a long time clients were men, and the entire building industry has always been male-dominated.
(Zaha Hadid)