Of Stones and Love
“Trenta anni (thirty years)”. That was Daniele’s answer to my question, “How long have you and Piero worked together?”
I was stunned! I would have guessed Daniele to be 34. He moves brick and stone and buckets of mortar like a young man in his prime. Wherever you find Piero – a person with some of the best manners and kindest smiles I have ever encountered – there you find Daniele. If there are two men in the whole of Italy with a more robust, energetic, and positive disposition toward their work than Piero and Daniele, you will be hard pressed to find them.
“Yes, 30 years in January”, Daniele reflected in the ancient and modern home they are renovating for us. “We do everything together ... spend more time together than with our wives”.
Turns out I missed Daniele’s age by a decade. He went to work with Piero at the ripe old age of fourteen, after he realized he liked building more than books. Piero has mentored Daniele. Together the two of them, with the guidance of our geometra Roberto, tackle complex building issues in renovating the house my partner, Julie and I recently bought in Todi.
Prima Casa
We call it La Prima Casa, because it is the first house you meet when you climb the steep road that brings you into the ancient hill town of Todi, in the province of Umbria.
The Prima Casa is unlike any other house in Todi. Four stories vertical with a touch of modern, the top three floors could have been designed by the twentieth-century architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. On the left side, the house is built into a massive, medieval stone wall that ascends the hill to the Rocca above and retains five to ten metres of earth. We’re told this wall was part of the ‘third circuit’ of walls built to encircle the city in medieval times.
That’s a lot of history and engineering to integrate into a modern renovation project!
I too am a builder, but not like Piero and Daniele. I learned and practiced my craft in America, where we don’t build like Piero and Daniele – and we don’t live like them, either. We are about efficiency in our buildings and in our relationships. We are steeped in the virtues of expediency, economy and short-term profits. If we use stone in building, it’s a veneer concealing something hollow behind it.
Our structures, like our relationships, are often thin, mostly of air. When the waters rise, or the winds blow, they might topple over.
In Umbria, they built with stone. Stone is heavy and strenuous to configure. If you were to consider non-expedient building materials, stone would be high on the list. But expedience was not their pursuit. They were after something else ... something like a lifelong, working friendship. They built to defy time, to defy conformity and to defy the limits of their backs, shoulders, and crushable fingers.
A walk down a meandering medieval street in an Italian hill town is, for some people, life-changing. The senses return contradictory data: both exciting and pacifying; strange and familiar; echo hard and billowy soft. The soul reflects something from its uncharted depths.
I walk down the street in Todi. The stones bend. My un-gridded soul sighs. The street twists to the right, narrows and then twists to the left. The stone facades reveal centuries-old changes of plans. Inconveniently, the stone-arched windows of the 14th century didn’t suit the ambitions of the 16th-century inhabitants, who decided to block up those windows with stone and construct new ones higher up and to the left. Not to worry, the structure (and the street) adapt and endure like a soulful friendship.
We make our environs and then our environs make us. Will our buildings and our friendships be durable or disposable? A few of us lucky ones migrate from the air-filled environs of places in America to the stone configured stradas of places like Todi. The character of builders from centuries past speaks directly to my soul: “Build with affection, build to inspire, and build to endure whatever challenges life sends our way”.
And finally, as Piero and Daniele model: “Let the heart, like the stones, abide in friendship and love”.
Ken Gaylord