I was kneeling in the damp dust of a villa outside Pompeii last autumn, my flashlight catching the jagged edge of a broken pilae stack, when it hit me how much we get wrong about ancient comfort. Most textbooks treat…
Author: Elena Vasari-Pucci
A building tells you how it was built if you know where to look. I write about joints, mortar and the decisions of people who are long dead, because that is where the real story sits.
I remember standing in the shadow of a massive concrete cantilever during a site survey in the late nineties, the air thick with the smell of wet dust and ozone. Most people look up at these massive shells and see…
I was kneeling on a damp floor in a villa near Ravenna last autumn, my knees aching against the cold stone, when I realized most people look at a floor and see only a pattern. They see “art,” but they…
I was standing in the shadow of the Laurentian Library last autumn, tracing the way the stone seemed to buckle under the weight of its own elegance, when it hit me how much we get wrong. Most people approach the…
I was kneeling in the dust of a partially excavated villa near Pompeii last autumn, my flashlight catching the jagged edges of a collapsed hypocaust, when it hit me how much we misunderstand the mechanics of luxury. People tend to…
I was standing on a scaffolding in a dim chapel near Syracuse last autumn, scraping away a layer of what a previous “restorer” had called a luxury upgrade, only to find the original intent buried under a thick, suffocating coat…
I was kneeling in the damp shade of a Bologna corner last Tuesday, my calipers out and my notebook getting ruined by the humidity, when I realized most people walk right past the very thing that makes these places breathe….
I remember standing in a dusty site office outside Syracuse, staring at a cracked, peeling slab that a contractor had insisted was “cutting-edge” engineering. He spoke about the miracle of modern materials, but all I could see were the tell-tale…
I was standing in a damp, narrow passage in a crumbling Palazzo near Palermo last Tuesday, tracing the lime-wash decay with my flashlight, when it hit me how often we misinterpret these spaces. People tend to wax poetic about the…
I remember standing in a damp basement in Ravenna last autumn, my flashlight catching the way a modern, synthetic coating was literally suffocating a sixteenth-century wall. It was heartbreaking. Everyone thinks they can just slap a thick, waterproof layer of…