Antonio Campana
(1933-2008)
Antonio Campana was born in Avellaneda, province of Buenos Aires.
Son of Italian immigrants who arrived in the country in 1930, he studied until the 6th grade of primary school, which he had to abandon due to work issues.
At the age of 13 he began to work as a cadet at the Warehousemen's Center of the Federal Capital and then went on to occupy a place as a typist in this institution. His knowledge of the Italian language helped him to grow, as the directors of this organization were also of Italian nationality.
Meanwhile, on weekends and during his free time, he created a brush factory, where he manufactured brushes by hand, all at his home. He also interspersed this activity with a distribution of milk that they produced themselves, together with their family.
He graduated as a typist at the Pitman Academies in 1948 and perfected the Italian language. At the same time, he began his career as a dental mechanic, which he abandoned almost at the end of it, for reasons of work and time.
His parents, as good immigrants, instilled the culture of work and effort in Antonio, and his natural drive motivated him to always keep going. Over time his business activity grew, adding groceries and cleaning supplies to his business venture.
With a wealth of knowledge and experience, at the age of 23 he founded the first self-service wholesale groceries in the country. In the same year he met Liliana, an Italian national, the woman who accompanied him in all his projects, until his last days.
At the age of 25 they got married and had 3 children.
Always in search of new horizons and already established as a large wholesale grocery store and supermarkets, he continued to develop his activities in the province of Mendoza, starting to manufacture his own line of canned preserves produced on his own farms.
He spent many years of his life working tirelessly, sleeping only 6 hours a day. His tenacity, memory, willpower and love of work were surely the key to his commercial success.
At the age of 50, he suffered his first tonsil cancer, which caused a very abrupt change in his life.
His pace of work and activities was very intense, he needed to continue putting that desire to live somewhere else. Wanting to pass the time to find out if he was cured, motivated him to put all his energy into a field acquired as an investment in 1976. It had been expropriated by CEAMSE a short time later and after a hard legal struggle, finally recovered on the same date from his health problems.
Everything coincided with the hand and miracle of God to begin to develop his dream, a new story in his book: Campanopolis, a magical village, without a doubt a madness that prolonged his life for more than 25 years.
The Dream of an Enlightened One
On many occasions, a person's life marks a different pattern. This makes the theory that life itself is a synthesis of human values and is not a path artificially created by the enlightened. Hence the connection with reality, a virtual anti-dogmatism, because rationality governs and assumes ethical behaviors that are poured over society and are assumed by it in a natural way. The work that can be seen in Campanopolis, the work of the artistic genius, dreamer and lofty of a son of immigrants, who, like so many others who made Argentina modern, is the rescue of the creative, dynamic and transgressive spirit.
Antonio Campana, the crystallizer of the dream, when condemned to die victim of a terminal illness, decides to turn his existence upside down and devote himself to a dream.
He detaches himself from his companies and builds this for himself and his people, family and friends, without commercial sense, betting on the illusion and pleasure of creating something on land recovered from a landfill and using demolition materials, with a broad ecological and regenerative spirit.
He builds a village, with mixtures of styles, reminiscent of the Middle Ages, in the middle of forests planted by himself, places of magic. He breaks the molds of construction, because he does the opposite of all architects. On the basis of the old, he builds the new. Out of the Chaos of a demolition he creates an Order, creating life from death or bringing it into being after death.
Campanopolis is the concretion of a true Initiation, dying to one life, to see the light in another. John Lennon, the popular English musician, said, "Many think I'm a dreamer... but I'm not the only one", and Antonio Campana proves it. He's another dreamer. He falls into the category of those who dared to fly and carried out their work in life, transcended, created from destruction and illuminated with Light the darkness of a wasteland turned into a garbage dump. He knew how to polish the rough stone and gave it the brilliance of the diamond, bequeathing to his children a love of the work and a respect for memory, such as is rarely seen today.
Visitors' senses are fully awakened, sharpened, because they must be used to the fullest extent to understand what is seen and felt in that fantastic place.
