Am I Still a Criminal?

In September of 2009 I became a criminal in Italy. My crime was to speak my opinion about an incompetent Italian prosecutor named Giuliano Mignini. Mignini responded by saying he would indict me for defamation and further that he would indict the journalist who quoted me and the newspaper that printed it.

Last week, Giuliano Mignini was found guilty by an Italian court of illegal phone tapping, abuse of high office, and dereliction of duty. He was sentenced to 16 months in jail.

I'm a criminal in Italy

While on vacation in New York, I became a criminal in Italy. An Italian prosecutor named Giuliano Mignini has charged me with defamation, which is a criminal, not a civil, charge in Italy and which is prosecuted by the state without any expense to Mignini - though potentially great expense to myself. My offense? I called him a bully. His response, bringing the power of the state against a small fry such as myself, only serves to prove my point.

Here's how it came about: I sent an email to a friend in Italy who is a journalist. I was commenting on the Amanda Knox case. He published my comments (with my permission). This is what I said:

"The Meredith Kercher murder is one of those mirrors that reflects the prejudices of whoever is looking into it. There is no physical evidence and no credible motive, and yet an egotistical prosecutor is blaming Amanda Knox anyway. In the USA, this would only happen if she were black. Perhaps partying American college kids are so hated in Italy that Amanda will be treated as blacks are treated in the USA, and she will be convicted not because of the evidence but because of general resentment of shallow rich Americans. Personally, from what I've read I don't like Amanda Knox. She sounds spoiled, naive, and shallow. But that's not a crime. I loathe the prosecutor, who has a counterpart in every city in the USA - a preening, intellectually dishonest bully who cares more about making newspaper headlines than in serving justice. It's the same all over the world. Power and prejudice are the enemies of justice."

Next thing I know, I'm being contacted by CBS news asking me to comment on the fact that I'm being sued by this nutcase of a prosecutor.

I'm safe in the USA. Bottom line is, I probably will never be able to set foot in Italy again. Which is a damn shame. I love that land, I love those people. I made some good friends over there.

By the way, I regret the way I characterized Amanda Knox. The more I learn about her, the more I see her as simply a naive college kid caught in a bad place. I imagine she's growing up fast.

There will always be laundry

Wherever,

whenever...

There will always be laundry.

Beppe Sebaste: Panchine

If you want to buy a book, first the dog has to approve you. If you smell okay, this little store in Lucca, Italy, might sell you a copy of Panchine: Come Uscire dal Mondo senza Uscirne by Beppe Sebaste, a lovely book of meditations on the subject of park benches (panchine) and how to exit the world without really leaving. Beppe looks like your grandfather and is the kind of guy you want to sit down and have a beer with - on a park bench, perhaps, while playing a game of chess.

The epigraph at the front of the book is a quote from Richard Brautigan:

Why is a short story short?
Ask that man sitting on a bench
in the park, any park, but be prepared, for he might
tell you a story longer
than you would want to listen to.

Beppe did me the honor of reading a passage from my Le Famose Patate to an audience in Piacenza, Italy. It was a passage about hitchhiking in an old pickup truck banging across the fields of Illinois. Maybe thoughts on the bench seats in old pickups are an American equivalent to meditating on a park bench in Italy. The last lines of the passage were:

"You got kids? How many?"
"'Leven."
"Eleven! Wow! How do you feed them all?"
"With a spoon. Haw haw."
Haw haw. A good answer to an impertinent question. Of course the children would be fed. As we bounced between the fields of America in a dirty old farm truck, I had no doubt that the children of this land would always be fed.

But he used these words:

"Hai figli? Quanti?"
"Undici."
"Undici! Cacchio! E come fai a dargli da mangiare?"
"Col cucchiaio. Ah-ah."
Ah-ah. La giusta risposta a una domanda impertinente. Certo, vuoi che non desse loro da mangiare? A mano a mano che avanzavamo sobbalzando tra i campi d'America nel vecchio camioncino sidicio, mi si stemperava ogni dubbio: i gigli di questa terra avrebbero avuto sempre qualcosa da mangiare.

Work and Play

I like it when a stonemason combines work and play. This whole wall is playful.

I guess his name is Muccia.

Another example would be Limey Kay, who I wrote about here and here.

Limey and Muccia would have liked each other.

Living with the Past: the Naked Remodel

It's a modern school housed in medieval stone, patched here and there with brick. I know how difficult it is with schools: There's always a balancing act with the budget, and the physical plant is usually the first cut. Still, they're doing a nice job. They've kept the walls from crumbling while adding a graceful modern door here, removing an old window there, even adding a glass roof and suspended lights over the little piazza.

Living with the Past: the Naked Remodel

They started building this church in the year 870. Eventually, even with brick and stone, things fall apart. I can count about six different repair jobs in this small section, involving at least three different tradesmen using different bricks and different styles. When you work with brick, your workmanship is your brand, and it really stands out - sometimes in a good way, sometimes not.

As a tradesman myself, I try not to be too critical of other people's work. Heaven knows I've made my share of sloppy repairs - but usually the sloppiness was because the owner wanted it quick and dirty and cheap. Eventually I stopped taking those cheap jobs because, like the bricks in the upper left of this photo, your quick cheap repair might last for centuries, insulting your reputation each and every day.

(You can click on the photo to see more detail.)

Living with the Past: the Naked Remodel

It looks almost like an architectural drawing. Somebody sliced away half of this palace and then left it like that. The remaining structure is still very much in use. The other half is now a vacant lot. I sure wonder why these things happen.

Living with the Past: the Naked Remodel

Ancient housing, modern communications. (And nakedly repaired - or removed - chimneys.)
How do you blend the old and the new?
The answer seems to be that if it's above the roof, you don't bother to blend. In fact, you consider yourself lucky if the installation guys don't destroy the roof in the process.

At street level, though, with a little care and a little paint, the electrical can be fairly unobtrusive, as with the house on the left. The plumbing is a tougher assignment. If you use copper, it can develop a nice patina. The house on the right chooses a less decorative approach, but it has a certain rough honesty to it, straight and simple.

Living with the Past: the Naked Remodel

I love how stone and brick buildings tend to reveal their history:

But sometimes, as in the case of this church, they seem downright immodest in how much they expose:

Living with the Past: Hardware

I call it a whale's tail. What's the official name? Where can I learn more about it? I assume it helps to keep the brick wall of the church from collapsing.

Living with the Past

The city of Lucca dates back to about 300 years before Christ, though settlements existed during the Stone Age. In the 16th century the city built its fourth and final wall around itself, a wall so massive that now an entire city park sits on top of it including this slightly out-of-plumb light pole and this stone lion.

The light pole and lion are relative youngsters, given the history of the place, but they maintain the old-time vibe.

The sign is announcing Barsotti Construction, which is building something behind the wire fence. Whatever they construct, I bet they make sure it blends in. On this spot we have 2000 years of blending already.

Living with the Past: Hardware

In the American West, when you rode your horse to town, you tied it to a wooden rail. In Siena, Italy, your horse had more elegant accommodations.

Hand-crafted, I assume, to explain the slight (and charming) differences.

The bricks remind me that the pigment colors "burnt sienna" and "raw sienna" are named after the color of earth in the town of Siena.

Somewhere out there in internet-land, surely somebody knows more about these metal fixtures (such as, for starters, what is their proper name?) Whoever you are, would it please somehow chance to happen, perhaps through divine intervention, that you read this blog and feel moved to tell me where I can learn more about these old fixtures?

Thank you.

Amen.

Living with the Past: Hardware

The Palazzo Pubblico again.

It's such a massive chain, I have to wonder how deeply those holders are embedded into the stone. And how are they set?

Are there reference books about this kind of old hardware?

As always, you can click on the image for a closer view (and see a nice pattern on the chain).

Living with the Past: Hardware

Same old building. This one's for tying your horse. What's that red stuff where the surface is chipped: rust, or lichen, or paint? From the style of it, can anyone figure the age?

You can click on the image for more detail.

Living with the Past: Hardware

Gryphon, swallowing snake, swallowing light bulb. The Palazzo Pubblico was built in 1281 and remodeled many times, the last time being 1908. When the gryphon appeared - and when the light bulb appeared, later - I have no idea.

You can click on the image to see more detail.

Living with the Past: Doors

Sometimes you improvise and hope it doesn't collapse before you get back to it ... maybe ... later...

Vernazza, Italy

Sometimes you've got a whole house to fix up, and the door will just have to wait...

San Donato, Italy

Sometimes you've got a church that's fallen on hard times, and new hinges just aren't in the budget...

Piacenza, Italy

Sometimes you go your own way...

Monterosso, Italy

And then sometimes you get it mostly right: not too grandiose but nicely, simply styled in harmony with the ancient city you're a part of. You're sorry about the kickplates, (and maybe you wish you'd used a dark bronze) but it's a tough neighborhood, and money's kinda tight, and the people who installed that gas meter on the lower left already messed up a couple of stones. Life is a compromise. You deal with it.

Lucca, Italy

Living with the Past: Doors

When you built a palace in the year 1275, say, or 1580, you wanted a door big enough to drive a horse and carriage through. A door 12 feet high, at least.

Later, maybe centuries later when you no longer have a retinue of servants opening and closing the doors for you, the thought occurs that it's a lot of work to move those massive portals. So you find a carpenter to cut a smaller door-within-a-door.

A very short carpenter, apparently. Almost every door-within-a-door that I saw would require major crouching to pass through. Some are only 60 inches tall. What were they thinking? The Italians are such masters of good design, I figure there must be some good reason for these inadequate doors-within-doors. But what?

Sometimes the shape of the cutout was clearly dictated by the design of the existing door, and a nice blend was achieved.


But other times, not so much.

Ferramenta, Lucca, Italy

It seems to be a one-man operation. At this ferramenta you can get a key duplicated or buy a metric hex-head bolt or deal with any of those funky home-owning chores. Or you can do what's important in life: You can put some fantastic hardware on your front door.

Living with the Past: the Naked Remodel

When you visit old cathedrals, you're supposed to think about the architecture, the art, the history, the soaring grandeur, the holy spirit. Me, I think about the bricks.

At least, that's what I was studying at the Basilica di San Antonino in Piacenza. The first church on this location was built around the year 350. Then in the year 850 they disassembled it and moved it - yes, moved it, according to my guidebook - to a town more than 100 kilometers from here. (Or maybe something was lost in translation.) Anyway, the existing church was begun in the year 870.

The octagonal tower was built in two phases, first in the year 1004, then the upper section with windows in the late 12th century. If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see in the octagonal tower a change in the color of brick at two points - and that's what fascinates me.

Bricks that are manufactured in different centuries are going to look different. So is the workmanship of the craftsmen who apply them. Also different will be the amount of wear and tear.

I couldn't get close to the tower, but I could get as close as I wanted to the pronaos - that thing in front with the huge arch. So I studied the bricks of the buttresses of the pronaos.

There are at least four phases of brickwork in just this small section. I don't know which are repairs and which are simply changes of material in the original process of construction. The mortar changes, too, in both color and style of application. I like to imagine those rounded, smaller bricks near the bottom as salvaged from some ancient structure. I'm a little worried about the lack of visible mortar among them - but I assume somebody's keeping an eye on things. Above those rounded bricks, I like to imagine the blackened ones as recovered from a fire in some earlier era. I like to imagine a swarm of craftsmen over a string of centuries manufacturing bricks in big ovens or hauling old bricks from ancient ruins in groaning ox-carts. I see them mixing mortar, troweling, embedding, scraping, leveling, squinting with one practiced eye, assembling scaffolds, climbing ladders, hoisting and tuck-pointing, arguing and sweating, drinking, taking long breaks for lunch, going home to their children and watching them grow, teaching them how to lay bricks in a good and workmanlike manner. For me that's the soaring grandeur, the holy spirit.