LEGO Adventures

Ode to Amantea in LEGO

A LEGO Modular to a city I love

Robert McKeon Aloe
4 min readJan 8, 2021

I fell in love with Amantea soon after arriving. It is the place I desire to travel to and relax. I decided to build an ode to Amantea from Lego to help encapsulate everything I love about the city, particularly the complex pathways and steep roads.

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The entrance above is roughly modeled after this actual entrance of Centro Storico in Amantea.

At the top is a small church with a soup kitchen below.

I had some initial designs for the church, but the rest was freehand, trial, and error.

Design plans

I was able to make a small stained glass window in the back of the church as an ode to my grandma.

All the roads were very steep, but that’s how it is in the actual old part of town.

I had a restaurant inside that I hadn’t quite finished. The most I got to was making the hanging sopprasautta and the wine cellar. Fitting a kitchen was a tight squeeze.

On the other side, I made an art gallery, an architect office, and a coffee roaster. The art is clearly limited by the discrete steps of the blocks.

The coffee roaster was some great foreshadowing to only a year later when I started to home roast coffee.

I loved building the complex stairs as it seems so much of the beautiful architecture in Amantea is due to the old city being build in a restricted space.

I wish I had the time and resources to build out more of the city because it really is the city I love. After Paris, I never thought I’d enjoy another place as much as I did then.

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Robert McKeon Aloe

I’m in love with my Wife, my Kids, Espresso, Data Science, tomatoes, cooking, engineering, talking, family, Paris, and Italy, not necessarily in that order.