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Pietrasanta
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Pietrasanta
June 16, 2003
Dear friends and Families,
Some days we make special plans for a Significant Touring Event (STE) and some days we scramble. Today we did both.
Our planned-for STE was a guided tour of the famous quarries at Carrara. Fabio had arranged a bus tour of the quarries and related activities. All we had to do was drive about an hour down to the town of Massa and meet the bus. We started out fine, on the autostrada and off at the right places, but the directions from there were a little weak. When we called the tour guide's mobile phone she answered in German, but basically did nothing other than complain about why we weren't where we were supposed to be. She didn't seem to have time to solve the problem and give us better directions. Finally, she closed the conversation with "The bus is leaving. You're too late." Click.
Bummer. A tour of the Carrara quarries and workshops would have been a real STE. Now it's 9:30 in the morning and we're standing in a Massa parking lot, watching trucks go by, heavy with all kinds of stone blocks. We headed back to the autostrada, not knowing if we should go north or south or just return home for another day.
Just as we were about to enter the tollgate entrance, Marianne spotted a side road to Pietrasanta and remembered that Fabio had said it was a nice town. So we headed off in another direction - a better one it turned out.
Along the road, we saw all kinds of stone-related businesses: Vast storage lots of huge blocks of marble and granite, yards filled with stone sheets and tiles, smaller yards with various architectural details and "yard art".
Pietrasanta showed up as another pleasant old town and we decided to park and take a look. Luck being with us, we found a shaded parking lot with a tourist information booth in the corner. Our kind of place.
We asked for places to see and things to do and got the normal directions to churches and squares. The fort was temporarily closed for repairs. However, among the brochures was one from Blu Tour offering "Guided Tour to the secret world of foundaries and artistic marble laboratories". That could definitely be an STE, so Marianne called and made arrangements for a guided tour starting at 3:00pm. We would recover from the morning disaster after all.
In the meantime, we wandered around town and were impressed. There were art galleries on every corner and statues in every square, even modern works. Marianne loved it. The small Church of St. Martin, a very traditional old building, had two remarkable paintings by Fernando Botero, the prince of the local art community. These contemporary paintings of the gates of heaven and hell both clashed and fit with the old church.
Lunch was at the Trattoria da Sci, a small side-street place recommended by Barbara from Blu Tour. We may have discovered a pattern in good restaurants in Italy. First, get recommendations. It is impossible to judge by the look or by the menu in the window. Second, dine on side streets. Maybe it's just coincidence, but our out-of-the-way meals have been better than our on-the-piazza ones.
Workshop Tour
Promptly at 3:00, our guide Francesca showed up at our meeting point and introduced herself. She ís an art history graduate and does these tours with an enthusiasm that was only partly stifled by the afternoon heat. At an appropriately slow stroll, we walked across town to the Barsanti workshop. At first blush, it looked like an ordinary construction site with an extra helping of grey dust, but then Francesca lead us through and revealed its secrets.
Our first stop was the bronze foundry. Francesca patiently explained the complex process of making molds of the artist's work, building wax models, making refractory molds around the wax, melting the wax and hardening the molds, and finally pouring the bronze into the molds. At every step, craftsmen contribute step by step to the product we normally attribute to the artist. This is one of the oldest workshops in Italy and each craft is learned through years of experience. It will be impossible to again look at a bronze statue in a museum without remembering the contributions of the people whose names are NOT on the little plaques.
Our next stop was the mosaic workshop. The process has been unchanged for a couple thousand years, with each craftsman selecting and shaping stone pieces to build amazingly complex works of art. Their normal customers are churches, but this small workshop once did a huge mosaic for the famous Forest Lawn cemetery. That one piece required 15 craftsmen working for three years in Italy and three more months at the site in southern California. While we were in the shop, they were working on one private project for an unidentified (but rich!) client who wanted a complete replica of a famous Roman bath's mosaic floor. No matter what our next house project, I'm sure these guys are out of our league.
Our final workshop stop was the marble shop. Here, craftsmen transformed artists' models into final marble carvings. Francesca again patiently explained the process of going from an artist's model to the finished work in stone. I will not begin to explain the steps involved, but the final impression was one of tremendously skilled craftsmen working anonymously to produce "the artist's work".
(Footnote: Among the famous sculptors, only Michelangelo did his own carving. He claimed that only he knew where the work was hidden inside the stone. He also preferred to select his stones at the quarry because he felt he could see the image inside. Later, when we would see his huge David, we would appreciate the meaning of this unique practice.)
At the end of our tour, Francesca took us to see various works of art in the cathedral and in a nearby square. She showed us how to recognize statues carved from two-dimensional drawings versus those done from three-dimensional models. She also showed us how to recognize the marks of the bronze casting process and to appreciate truly master craftsmen, despite their anonymity.
We went home satisfied that we had made good use of our day. We ended up with an STE that taught us and would help us as we continue our tour of Italy.
John and Marianne
Websites: General, in Italian, but complete I think:
http://www.comune.pietrasanta.lu.it/
For marble art, just in case you need to pick up an original:
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Botero's depiction of heaven clearly would not win favors from Weight Watcher's. The arrangement is very traditional. The images are not. |
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Hell holds specific people for Botero: Hitler, of course, but also a drug-lord, a particular evil for the Columbia-born artist. Interestingly, Botero included himself and his wife in this condemned group. |
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Franchesca's tour of the bronze foundery started with an explanation of how patterns are made from the original art work. |
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Next, the craftsman uses the pattern to make a wax image of the finished art piece. He works with the artist to make sure the image reflects the artist's idea. |
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At this stage, the wax looks as the artist wants the final piece to look. |
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Next, a craftsman adds wax channels that will create bronze flow paths in the refractory mold. The bronze will be poured in the large central channel (formed by the plastic cup here) until the metal flows back out the smaller channels around the periphery of the top of the piece. |
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Mosaics are prepared as they have been for thousands of years. The craftsman selects and shapes pieces of glass or stone and glues them on a paper pattern. |
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This workshop has a large library of mosaic tiles. This shows only about a quarter of the inventory that we could see. |
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This is a simple example of the placement of mosaic tiles onto the pattern paper. |
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This picture showed the Forest Lawn mosaic. The theme is American history. Note the size of the people below the mosaic. |
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The marble area had a number of these stone cutters. They used diamond "teeth", water cooling, and time. |
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The craftsman carefully matches the original. Seeing this work being done gave a new appreciation for where marble art pieces comes from. |
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In the end, Francesca used paintings, marble staues, and bronzes from around Pietrasanta to illustrate the methods she had explained to us. |
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