I was on a team that was working on restoring four badly damaged old paintings that were found in the basement of a villa. Job one was to thoroughly clean them, including what had been accumulating under the frames for 400 years. So we brushed away dead insects and worms, scrubbed away mold, ironed the … Continue reading 11. 400-year old crud
Italy is known for its reverence for its children, often seen in restaurants and out walking with their parents well after American children would have been strong-armed into bed. Judging from the shop windows in Naples, there is a similar appreciation for brides, or at least the dress. We were lucky to stumble on a … Continue reading 10. Brides and bambini
To be able to work effectively on frescoes, Tonio feels that we need to have the experience actually making them. So off we went to the "masseria," an Italian farming estate, to learn the art, which involved carefully spreading two layers of plaster, then creating a "cartone," which is a drawing of what we wanted … Continue reading 9. The courage to be terrible
Now the real work starts. A group of us headed out to a structure containing badly-damaged frescoes, which had been painted over. Our job was to carefully scrape off the over-painting, using medical scalpels, and to mix plaster to fill in the obvious holes, but in such a way as to have where we had … Continue reading 8. The Real Work Begins
We spent the morning learning more about the techniques of evaluating and restoring old paintings, using 400 year-old paintings that had been found rolled up in closets, stashed in basements, moldy, creased, torn. It appears to me that the main techniques involve rolling hand-made special Q-tips soaked in solution across the painting, quarter inch by … Continue reading 7. The Q-tip Method
We had an excursion in the afternoon to Matera, the oldest continually-inhabited city in the world. For centuries, the people here lived in caves, called sassi, made famous by Carlo Levi's book, "Christ Stopped at Eboli," meaning that the area was so bleak even Jesus wouldn't go there. The government forced them out and into … Continue reading 6. An Evening in Matera
We headed to Altamura, a lovely small city nearby, to learn about the relationship between culture, history, materials, food, migration and much else. This is the city where our program leader Tonio grew up, which emboldened him to bring the whole group into a barbershop to see the thickness of the limestone wall in which … Continue reading 5. Shave and a Haircut
Another very full day. We spent the morning going through caves, seeing the remains of 1000 year-old frescoes in "churches," which seem to be small devotional spaces, not churches in our sense of the word. Tonio has made it his life's work to have access to as much of the land where they sit as … Continue reading 4. First Day in the Caves
We've had a jam-packed first day. We spent the morning on a three-hour, hot hot hike to the top of a hill, which was strewn with thousands of shards of Ancient Greek and Roman pottery. My "find" turned out to be an uninteresting piece of 200 BCE kitchen crockery, but others found beautiful pieces of … Continue reading 3. 2300-Year-Old Pieces of Pottery, Lying About Like Leaves in the Fall
Here we are! Picked up at the bus stop by Marco, a graduate student in economics and the nephew of the project leader, Tonio. We were shown to our room on the top floor of a gorgeous 16th-century palazzo, which, miraculously had its own bathroom and AC. So I'm all set. We arrived a little … Continue reading 2. Our First Night
Gigi's Italia 