I was kneeling in the dust of a Palermitan courtyard last summer, my magnifying glass inches away from a limestone block, when I realized how much we miss by simply looking at the “grandeur.” Most guidebooks will try to sell…
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 on a scaffolding in a crumbling palazzo near Palermo, squinting at a patch of wall that everyone else called “faded.” To the untrained eye, it was just a dying shade of yellow, but as I brushed away…
I was standing in the heat of a Sicilian afternoon last July, tracing the edge of a weathered Doric capital with my fingernails, when I realized how much we get wrong. Most guidebooks treat temples and their orders like a…
I was crouched in a damp corner of a 14th-century chapel near Ravenna last Tuesday, the smell of wet limestone and old dust filling my lungs, when I realized my sketchbook was more useful than my laser scanner. Most people…
I was kneeling in the salt-crusted silt of a Roman pier near Ravenna last autumn, my fingers tracing the jagged edge of a broken travertine block, when it hit me how much we misunderstand the sheer defiance of these structures….
I was surveying a mid-century renovation in Ravenna last Tuesday when I found myself staring, not at the beautiful frescoes, but at the junction where a new drywall partition met an old stone lintel. It was a mess of cheap…
I remember standing on a scaffold in a crumbling Palazzo near Palermo, scraping at a layer of “historical” terracotta that felt more like plastic than earth. The contractor insisted it was a premium reproduction, but the way it flaked—brittle, lifeless,…
I was crouched in the damp shadows of a basement in Rome last autumn, my flashlight beam dancing over a particularly stubborn patch of travertine, when it hit me. Most people look at the grand facades of the Renaissance and…
I remember standing in the dust of a collapsed courtyard in 1994, my hands stained with the grit of pulverized limestone, watching a supervisor argue about the “aesthetic grandeur” of a facade while ignoring the fact that the foundation was…
I was kneeling in the dust of a crumbling courtyard in Noto last spring, my fingers tracing a jagged fracture in a limestone corbel, when I realized how much we get wrong. Most guidebooks treat sicilian baroque after the earthquake…