When we left our restoration work yesterday, we noticed that they were setting up a large stage in the town piazza. After dinner, the streets were packed with people of all ages, all a little dressed up to see and be seen. The occasion? It turned out to be a dance recital of local kids, … Continue reading 13. Dancin’ in the Street
It is well-known that you cannot get a bad cup of coffee in Italy. There are virtual temples to coffee, like Gambrinus in Napoli, with gleaming equipment and baristas in tuxedos. Less well-known is that this includes 24-hour coffee vending machines that can be found all over Gravina. For the equivalent of 55 cents, you … Continue reading 12. Coffee Talk
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
Gigi's Italia 