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.

Living with the Past

Simply wonderful public space. It's in a tiny town - Alvito - in the mountains south of Rome.

I love so many things here. This picture could serve as an index for many of the topics I want to explore: Doors, both the grand and the weird. Naked remodels. Laundry. Roof gardens. Windows. Texture. Appreciating the old and embracing the new.

How, oh how, - and why, oh why - is that new rectangular door cut into what appears to be the base of a three-story stone wall?

Living with the Past: Cobblestone

True cobblestone.

And you don't have to worry about cars on the streets.

Lovely textures, everywhere.

It's an ancient little town in the mountains south of Rome.

It's more modern than it first appears. Besides the drains cut into the path, there is a cutout in the foreground that must be for a utility of some kind. Then there are the overhead wires and, not visible here, the TV antennas on the rooftops.

The narrow winding road leading to this tiny town reminded me of West Virginia (without the banjos). I'm told you could buy one of these houses for $20,000. Heck of a commute, though.