The Gulf of Baratti opens onto the Etruscan Coast, in the municipality of Piombino, at the foot of the Populonia promontory. An arc of dark sand sheltered by a coastal pine forest, with the hills behind it guarding the acropolis and Etruscan necropolises of the ancient city.

It is a landscape with a double stratification, archaeological and natural, where the forest of umbrella pines almost reaches the shoreline.

In this pine forest, just a few metres back from the beach, stands the Casa Esagono.

The building was designed in 1957–59 by the Florentine architect Vittorio Giorgini as a holiday retreat for himself, and it is among the most personal works of a reserved, experimental figure in Italian architecture.

A pioneer of an organic approach he called "Spaziologia", a scholar of natural structures, he later taught for decades at the Pratt Institute in New York.

The house has a plan of aggregated hexagons, modelled on the honeycomb cell; an entirely prefabricated timber structure, raised off the ground on six conical pillars of cruciform section, which free the ground and keep the house suspended among the pine trunks.

The assembly was itself an experiment: prefabricated in a workshop in Peccioli in 1960, the house was dismantled, transported to Baratti and reassembled in little more than a week.

Over the decades the house served as a laboratory and a meeting place.

Among those who passed through were Roberto Sebastián Matta and the young Gordon Matta-Clark, André Bloc, Isamu Noguchi and Emilio Vedova.

Since 2013 the Casa Esagono has been entrusted to the association BACo – Baratti Architettura e Arte Contemporanea, which also manages the architect's archive. A philological restoration completed in the 2020s, more than sixty years after its construction, returned the house to its original configuration, restoring it to cultural use through visits, residencies and exhibition activities.

The building's value is inseparable from its setting a lightweight, demountable architecture, built according to the geometries of nature, resting without invasive foundations on the fragile margin between pine forest and sea.