I remember standing in a drafty, deconsecrated chapel in Ravenna three years ago, my flashlight beam catching the way the light hit a row of heavy, built-in oak carrels. Most people walk into these spaces and see only the silence…
I was kneeling in a damp basement in Palermo last autumn, my flashlight cutting through a decade of silt, when I saw it: a lead junction from the 19th century, crudely soldered but still holding. Most people look at the…
I remember standing in a damp cellar outside Ravenna three years ago, watching a contractor prepare to strip a layer of lime plaster that had survived three centuries. He saw a mess that needed cleaning; I saw a chronicle of…
I remember standing in a courtyard in Noto last August, watching a young architect struggle with a digital simulation for a new villa. He was obsessing over high-tech, automated louvers and expensive sensor-driven glass, as if the solution to the…
I was standing in a damp courtyard near Syracuse last autumn, watching a contractor prepare to blast away a layer of calcified lime to “clean up” a sixteenth-century facade. It was gut-wrenching. There is this pervasive, expensive myth in our…
I was in a crumbling palazzo near Ravenna last autumn, my knees aching from kneeling on damp travertine, when I realized how much time we waste discussing the “grandeur” of a flight of stairs. People obsess over the marble finish…
I spent three hours yesterday squinting at a single stretch of opus reticulatum, trying to figure out why the mortar density shifted so abruptly near a corner joint. Most people visit the Hadrian Villa at Tivoli and see nothing but…
I was standing in a courtyard in Syracuse last spring, watching a technician apply a synthetic resin to a limestone block that had survived two millennia of salt spray, only to be “protected” by a modern chemical coating. It felt…
I was standing in a damp basement in Palermo last autumn, my flashlight tracing the edge of a sixteenth-century limestone plinth, when the site supervisor started grumbling about the “red tape” of heritage protection law. To him, the regulations were…
I was standing in a damp basement in Palermo last November, staring at a section of sixteenth-century limestone that had been “stabilized” by some well-meaning technician using a modern, non-breathable epoxy resin. It was a disaster. The stone wasn’t breathing…