209. Tiny Pieces

I come from a long line of artists. My Aunt Rose Casella went solo to Perugia in the 1930s to study painting, an endeavor I’m sure was highly unusual for an American young woman. My Aunt Gloria Casella was a graduate of the Art Institute in Chicago, arguably the best art school in the country. Even my mother, with no training, could do a creditable sketch or watercolor when the mood struck.

That said, I inherited exactly none of that artistic talent. I occasionally take some sort of watered-down adult education art class, and even then am so terrible that I find it humiliating and utterly unenjoyable. So whatever possessed me to take a course in mosaics during my time in Italy?

One could easily make the case that Italy has been the most artistically creative and productive country of the Western world. So it seemed that while in Italy, I needed to immerse myself in that tradition somehow. I have always been fascinated and wowed by the mosaics in Ravenna, in Venice, and especially in Sicily, where there are fantastic representations of both the Roman and the Byzantine. So mosaics it would be.

I decided to avoid Ravenna, the main tourist destination for seeing mosaics in Italy, where a number of strategically-located mosaic schools are located, seemingly to capitalize on the tourist trade. Thanks to the internet, I was able to find a small school, In Tessere, in the small middle-class Umbrian town of Narni Scalo, about an hour out of Rome, and they had a three-day course on offer. Perfetto!

It turns out this school is very serious business. Most of the other students were professionals in the arts or design, and were there for a full two-month professional course. I was definitely out of my league.

Beginners start with Roman mosaics, which are done in marble. Agnes, the instructor who spoke English and French, was assigned to me. My first job was the use a special hammer to break sheets of marble into perfect 1-cm squares, into tessere, the little pieces of a mosaic. Not only could I not use the hammer without spraying broken pieces of marble everywhere, but I also didn’t even have an internal sense of what a centimeter was, as I would with an inch or a foot. Suddenly, I wished I had paid attention during those sixth-grade lessons on the metric system.

We had clippers to cut the pieces into exactly the right shape and size, and to make sure that each piece was approximately the same height. After choosing the pattern and marble colors I wanted to use, and considerable chopping and clipping, I got to work gluing the tessere onto the pattern I had chosen.

In Roman mosaics, all tessere must be only one of four shapes: square, rettangolo, triangolo, and trapezoid. Agnes had to remind me of this over and over again, as I would try to squeeze an eight-sided piece into a blank space. The Romans would not have approved!

All the other students had a professional motivation to learn more about mosaics, either for artistic or commercial reasons. We would all arrive at 8:30, bustle around the studio collecting our supplies, work until 1:00 for the pausa, come back from 2:30-5:30, and then clean up. No chitchat, just serious work, and suggestions, corrections, and questions answered by the instructors. Sometimes, I spent an hour trying to figure out how to best fit my tessere into a 2-inch – er, 5-centimeter – square.

When I was done, I scraped off the errant bits of glue. The instructor coated the whole piece with a substance to make the colors pop, and then wrapped it up nicely for me to bring home and hang in a place of honor on my wall. I think my humble effort will benefit from not being surrounded by the gorgeous work of my fellow students and the instructors all around the studio.

So can I claim to have entered the great Casella artistic dynasty? Not quite. But I do have a Attestato di Partecipazione, a certificate of participation, that will bring me pride and fond memories in the years to come.