The original owner of this 280-square-foot apartment, the Italian poet Angela Panaro, spent her life surrounded by words—they weren't just tools, but places to return to when the world became too much. In Eboli, inside a grand and historic building overlooking the town’s Piazza San Lorenzo, Panaro found an apartment that could fulfill her vision. Her writer’s refuge was not especially large, a space with room for only the basic essentials: a desk, a few books, and the right light.

The Cube, to use the name given by architect Luca Bruno to the apartment’s central installation, appears to float inside the otherwise white space—Bruno points in particular to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as inspiration.

On the right, a handcrafted wooden kitchen by Vito Micciariello.…