Lofoio is a small maker-space created in a workshop in the heart of the artisan district par excellence of Florence: Santo Spirito. The historic centres of our cities were formed by adapting to a financial and productive model for which the craftspeople’s workshops were vital. By and large, all the premises located on the ground floor were workshops populated by craftspeople who would produce all the objects and services used in ordinary everyday life, which nowadays are mainly produced on an industrial level instead. It was inevitable that these premises would empty, and that as they did so, both the trades that used to be carried out there and a healthy relationship with objects and things would begin to vanish too.

Lofoio tries to re-create this relationship through workshops and courses where manual activities take centre stage, from the simplest such as household repairs and maintenance to the more complicated such as artisan techniques, in the conviction that knowing how things are made also means learning to know the value of those things and the people who produce them. In practice Lofoio tries to build on DIY to help us rediscover the significance and quality of craftsmanship. The tool to achieve this objective is the workshop, where a wide range of tools and pieces of equipment can be used on a shared basis open to all the community, which can therefore learn how to use them, first of all, and then use them on their own for their own projects or for small amateur activities such as sewing, modelling, creating prototypes, designing, DIY, carpentry, decoration, and any other activity that it is difficult to carry out in our clean little city apartments.