I spent three hours last Tuesday in the Duomo, not looking at the frescoes or the golden light, but crouched on a scaffold, tracing the line where the brickwork meets the ribs. Most guidebooks will try to sell you a…
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 was kneeling in the dust of a Chianti cellar last Tuesday, my flashlight catching the rhythmic, uneven scarring of a chisel on a limestone lintel, when I realized how much we get wrong about this landscape. Most people look…
I was kneeling in the dust of a crumbling site near Ostia last autumn, my knees aching and my camera lens fogging, when I saw it again: that stubborn, defiant refusal of the material to simply give up. Most people…
I was kneeling in the damp dust of a crumbling courtyard near Syracuse last autumn, my fingers tracing a hairline fracture that shouldn’t have been there. Most people look at a peeling facade and see decay, but I saw a…
I remember kneeling in the dust of a crumbling Sicilian courtyard last summer, my fingers tracing the grit of a lime-based mortar that felt entirely alien to the precision of the Venetian brickwork I’d surveyed a decade prior. People love…
I was standing on a scaffolding in Turin last October, my fingers tracing the oxidized seam where a wrought-iron balcony met a limestone lintel, when it hit me how much we misinterpret this era. Most people walk past these buildings…
I was kneeling in the dust of a site near Ostia last autumn, my knees aching against the uneven ground, when I saw it again—that same, frustratingly vague explanation in a textbook about how Roman concrete was made. They always…
I spent three hours last Tuesday crouched on a scaffold near the Duomo, not looking at the skyline, but squinting at a single, stubborn seam of mortar. Most people visit the brunelleschi dome in florence to marvel at the sheer…