When the Hotel Room Becomes the Artwork

Inside Alfredo Pirri's Suite 101 at Four Points by Sheraton Catania

I took off my shoes and walked out onto a floor of broken mirrors.

Nothing had prepared me for it. I had been invited to stay at the Four Points by Sheraton Catania Hotel & Conference Center, in Aci Castello, on the coast just north of Catania, and I expected what anyone expects from a hotel by the sea in summer.

The art began at the reception. They walked me around to show me the pieces, and I started to understand that I had arrived somewhere so different than I had imagined.

Then they took me up to Suite 101.

The room had been permanently transformed by the Italian artist Alfredo Pirri into the site-specific installation Passi Aci Castello 2026. I knew none of this before I walked in.

Sleeping inside an installation

This is not a suite decorated with art. The room is the artwork.

Pirri is a multidisciplinary Italian artist whose work deals with light, space, reflection, and the physical presence of the person standing in it. Suite 101 makes that immediate, and it makes it physical.

I was encouraged not to drop my bag and head straight for the pool or the bar. I was invited to stop. To experience the room.

For someone like me, drawn to anything artistic or spiritual, that made sense straight away. I closed the door, took off my shoes, and started to walk.

The glass is cool. It was high summer outside, but the floor had stayed cold, and you do not really walk on it — you slide. For a moment it feels like walking on water. Your reflection moves underneath you as you go, breaking apart and reassembling from angles you did not choose.

Let us be honest: there is something charming, and even sexy, about walking on mirrors. I was alone and barefoot, surrounded by fragments of myself, and nobody was watching.

Slowly, I let go.

After a while I began to believe that no one was looking at me, except me, looking back. And that can be the most unforgiving observer of all.

What started as play turned into a much longer conversation, and a confrontation, between myself and I.

Three Sicilian women

Then the room did something I did not expect. It became a spiritual experience.

Suite 101 is built around three women bound up with Sicilian devotion: Saint Agatha, Saint Lucy and Saint Rosalia. They are present through three colours — green for Agatha, yellow for Lucy, pink for Rosalia — and through three wooden structures that read as writing desks, or seats, or contemporary kneelers.

At the centre of the mirrored floor sits an intense indigo triangle filled with feathers, repeated across the broken surface again and again.

Surrounded by those three women, I felt I was in very good company. I thought about the strength of Sicilian women, and about my own connection to the island, and I felt a quiet pride in being Sicilian myself.

I left the room smiling.

Leaving, and coming back

This is still a hotel, and the move from introspection to leisure had clearly been thought about.

The pool is very large and looks out over the sea. I spent some time there letting the room settle. Later, with a cocktail, I was still thinking about the confrontation I had just had with my own reflection.

I went on exploring, and this is where I understood what I had walked into. The hotel houses the fON Art Gallery, curated by Fondazione OELLE Mediterraneo Antico ETS. But the art does not stay inside the gallery. It runs through the reception, the corridors, the lifts, the communal areas, and into several of the bedrooms and suites. I had no idea of the scale of it before I arrived. There are pieces by Agostino Bonalumi, Gabriele Basilico, Urs Lüthi, Nobuyoshi Araki and Michael Christopher Brown. There are other artist rooms too, including Ryan Mendoza's MetaArtRoom 251, which came out of a residency the artist spent inside the hotel and pairs the physical room with a virtual encounter with its earlier life.

But the thing that stayed with me was going back into Pirri's suite afterwards.

The second time I walked in, something had changed. Not the room. In me.

I was freer in it, more comfortable, much more in the flow. This time I did not examine every reflection. I danced.

I found a more frivolous almost childish part of myself — the part that usually stays hidden underneath being observed, being self-conscious, being in control.

The room had not given me an artwork to look at. It had given me a private space to meet different versions of myself: first the observer, then the critic, then the Sicilian woman, then the child, and finally the artist.

More than a room with art

We say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And so is art.

I feel I have a mission to give everything that passes through my eyes the chance to become art. Every word, every encounter, every person, every step. I absorb it all like a sponge. It goes down through the subconscious, and sooner or later it comes back out in another form.

That is why a room that was itself an artwork was such a strong experience.

Suite 101 is not a hotel room with art in it. The room is the work, and while you are staying there you are part of it.

I arrived expecting a beautiful room, a gallery visit, some sun and a cocktail by the sea.

Instead I found myself barefoot on broken mirrors, with three Sicilian saints and several fragmented versions of myself.

My stay at the Four Points by Sheraton Catania Hotel & Conference Center was hosted by the hotel. All experiences and opinions here are my own.

Discover more

• Four Points by Sheraton Catania and the fON Art Gallery
• Fondazione OELLE Mediterraneo Antico ETS
• My personal work on RossoArt