8
FATTO A MANO (MADE BY HAND)
In the early fifteenth century, a Venetian sailor wanted to bring his fiancée a souvenir of his exotic voyages. Too poor to afford a proper gift, he plucked a ruffled sea plant called Halimeda opuntia from the waters off Greece and carried it home to the island of Burano in the Venice lagoon.
His beloved, enchanted by the algae’s scalloped edges and raised furls, fretted that the memento would soon disintegrate. Determined to create something that would last as long as their love, she picked up a needle used to mend fishing nets. Plying white thread into intricate patterns, she replicated the delicate whorls. The stunning result was “mermaid’s lace,” an ingenious design that helped launch Burano’s lace-making industry.
With this tale in A Beautiful Woman in Venice, Kathleen Gonzalez, a sister appassionata, tugged me into a world woven of fiber, air, and passion. For centuries, Venetian lace, gossamer as a spider’s web, represented absolute luxury. A single piece required weeks or months of eye-straining labor. Yet other than accenting regal robes, adorning ladies’ bosoms, or trimming clerical vestments, it served no practical function. Like the filigreed glass from its sister island of Murano, no one needed Burano’s lace—but everyone wanted it.
The price for spun-sugar works of wearable art skyrocketed so high that Venice’s rulers, fearing that a lust for lace would bankrupt its stylish citizens, issued sumptuary laws limiting its use on cuffs, collars, or gowns. Unencumbered by such restraints, wealthy customers in other nations bought Venetian lace by the bolt. For his coronation, Louis XIV commissioned a collar that took two years to stitch and cost hundreds of times its weight in gold.
Burano prospered, sparkling as brightly as its vibrantly painted houses and fishing boats. In 1755, as many as 40 percent of the island’s women were making lace, bending over pillows that cushioned their needlework as they worked. More women on the Venice lagoon—spinsters, widows, nuns, abandoned wives, retired courtesans—took up their needles to weave new lives for themselves. As the industrious lace makers earned money for dowries, parish priests reported a surge in marriages and a drop in babies born out of wedlock.
The opulent age of lace and luxury ended with the political upheavals that overthrew the French monarchy in the 1790s and rocked Europe for decades. With family fortunes lost, the formerly rich could no longer afford their cherished frills. The market for Venice’s delicate handiwork all but disappeared.
THEN CAME THE DISASTROUS WINTER of 1871. Temperatures plummeted so low that the lagoon froze over. With their boats trapped in ice, Burano’s fishermen couldn’t leave the harbor. Without a daily catch, its residents began to starve. Italians in the recently unified nation organized benefits to raise money for desperately needed supplies.
The islanders survived the deep freeze, but Italy’s Parliament sought a long-term solution for their precarious finances. The brightest hope seemed Burano’s famed needlework, but the lace industry had become, as one observer put it, “a very dead Lazarus.”
A countess and a princess, with the backing of Italy’s recently crowned Queen Margherita, headed a campaign to resurrect it. Ultimately Burano’s fate rested on its last lace maker, an illiterate septuagenarian known as Cencia Scarpariola. Although she could not write her own name, Cencia was a living encyclopedia of knots, twirls, loops, and patterns—secrets in danger of dying with her.
The mistress of the girls’ school in Burano became Cencia’s sole apprentice. Under the old woman’s tutelage, the teacher-turned-student mastered every detail of the painstaking process of weaving a fantasy in thread. In 1872, the Scuola dei Merletti (Embroidery School) of Burano, housed in the former governor’s palazzo, admitted its first eight students. Stitch by stitch, its passionate lace makers brought the island back to life.
By the turn of the twentieth century, 350 women were working six hours a day—seven in summer’s light—in white aprons and oversleeves to keep their work clean. The industry survived two world wars and a global depression. But it could not withstand a flood of cheap imported lace in the 1960s.
The Burano lace-making school closed, only to reopen in 1981. The island inaugurated a lace museum in 2011. Although far fewer locals make their living from lace, tourists throng the island’s shops to take home with them, like the long-ago Venetian sailor, a delicate memento of the marvels they have seen.
WHEN SHE WAS SEVEN, Gloria d’Este, a daughter and granddaughter of Burano lace makers, received her first embroidery hoop as a present from her mother and happily spent hours mastering stitches and techniques. When the island could not offer her a career, Gloria found another place in the world of il filo (the thread), as a weaver at Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua, the last traditional textile maker in Venice. Its luxury fabrics hang in the Vatican, royal palaces, museums, and halls of governments around the world.
When we meet in a converted silk mill in Venice’s Santa Croce district, Gloria walks me back in time. Here the forefathers of the Bevilacqua family rescued fifteen hand-operated looms after Napoleon shut down the industry to eliminate competition for French workers. Each is almost the size of a piano, with thousands of taut threads suspended in air, their arrangement so intricate that it can take weeks or months to set up a new pattern. Sample books, stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves, contain more than 3,500 unique designs in the form of “cartoons,” similar to the punch cards of early computers.
The workspace, dark and dank, defies every principle of modern ergonomics. Weavers hunch over looms, repeating the same muscle-wearying motions thousands of times a day. With one hand, they pull a heavy wooden lever while the other zips a shuttlecock across the threads. Constantly scanning for a broken thread or missed stitch, they control the rhythm with a hard thrust of the right leg on a foot pedal. For complex patterns in velvet, damask, or brocade, they work at the slower-than-snail’s pace of four inches a day.
Bevilacqua also operates a modern textile factory on the “mainland” with automated looms that churn out reams of textiles for export in a fraction of the time. So why do weavers like Gloria dedicate months, even years, to a single commission?
Not for the money, since wages are no higher than at the modern plant. Gloria prizes the link to all her predecessors who wove their stories into a galaxy of stitches. And the process itself appeals: The threads feel alive, changing when Venice turns cold or warm, wet or dry. So in tune are weavers with their looms that they can predict acqua alta (high water) in Piazza San Marco by the way the wood begins to squeak in the changing humidity. One woman tells me that she talks to her loom—cajoling, praising, chiding, occasionally cursing.
Beyond these reasons are pride in crafting something of beauty every day and passion for a great tradition that existed long before and will continue long after. Although machines can mass-produce similar fabrics, they cannot replicate all the stitches or impart the softness and sheen of handwoven cloth.
“Even though the pattern is set, the final product depends on what I see, what I feel,” says Gloria. “After months of working on a piece, I almost hate to let it go, because I’ve lived with it so long that it’s become part of me.”
FOR MUCH OF ITALY’S HISTORY, artists and artisans, possessed by the same passion to create with their hands, were equals, without words to distinguish between them. In the Middle Ages, arte meant “guild,” a collection of specialists in a certain field. The seven major arti included judges, notaries, cloth weavers, money changers, wool and silk merchants, furriers, and physicians and apothecaries (painters belonged to this group). The fourteen minor guilds encompassed butchers, shoemakers, innkeepers, bakers, and such. Those who literally got their hands dirty—sculptors, blacksmiths, stonemasons, wood-carvers—worked as laborers for low pay and little, if any, recognition.
To prepare for the creative trades, young boys (no girls allowed) trained in a bottega, a small art factory that turned out everything from paintings and statues to gilded baskets, wedding chests, coats of arms, candelabri, and church bells. Under the scrutiny of a sharp-eyed maestro, apprentices learned a full range of technical skills: how to whittle a pen from a goose quill, carve wood, hammer metal, grind stone, mold plaster, chisel marble, sculpt clay, select dyes, and mix paints.
Even acclaimed Renaissance artists crafted objects for daily use as well as masterpieces. Michelangelo fashioned an inkwell for the Duke of Urbino and designed reading desks for the Medici library. Leonardo sketched a warping machine; a model based on his design remains in use at the Antico Setificio, the antique silk factory, in Florence. Botticelli’s elaborate intarsio (inlaid wood) adorns Urbino’s Palazzo Ducale. Cellini hammered a saltcellar of gold, ivory, and enamel for the table of the French king Francis I.
What set such marvels of workmanship apart from works of art was their function. Unlike paintings and statues created to inspire faith, recount mythological deeds, or glorify a ruler, they served practical purposes. But in their never-ending passion for beauty, Italian artisans elevated even utilitarian items to a higher aesthetic plane.
CONSIDER THE EVER-SO-HUMBLE PLATE. Gold and silver platters once gleamed on the tables of privileged Etruscans and Romans. In more modest homes, family members served themselves with fingers and rudimentary spoons from a communal platter. In the Middle Ages, terra-cotta or “cooked earth” plates, baked from clay in village kilns, replaced crude metal dishes.
In the thirteenth century, an Arabian technique for glazing rough clay with gleaming white enamel made its way, via the Spanish island of Majorca, to Italy. The Umbrian town of Deruta, with rich clay lining its riverbanks and plentiful brush to fire the hungry kilns, embellished maiolica (majolica) with colorful designs baked into the glaze during a second firing. By the fourteenth century, Deruta, crammed with busy potters, was paying its taxes in vases and shipping a thousand plates in a single order to nearby Assisi, deluged with pilgrims to the shrine of San Francesco.
The Renaissance brought new inspiration to Italy’s ceramicists. Fascinated by classical art, the painter Raphael had himself lowered into excavations, called grotte, in Rome. He replicated “grotesque” images of flowers, plants, animals, and whimsical shapes in the papal chambers within the Vatican. When copies circulated throughout Italy, Deruta’s potters quickly adapted the colorful designs into the “raffaellesco” patterns that remain popular to this day.
About forty miles away, in the mountainside village of Gubbio, a potter named Mastro Giorgio Andreoli (ca. 1465–1555) became intrigued with another Arabian form of alchemy that turned clay plates into gold—or at least made them shimmer like the precious metal. The key was a “third firing” of an already twice-baked ceramic in a specially constructed oven called a muffola that produced an intensely smoky blaze.
If the fire was neither too hot nor too cool and burned just long enough, the carbon in the smoke combined with salts in the metallic pigments to form a thin coating that, with vigorous polishing, imparted a gleaming sheen. Noble families immediately clamored for this lustro (luster), and potters throughout Italy sent their best pieces to Mastro Giorgio for his finishing touch.
In the tumultuous centuries that followed the Renaissance, Italy became a battleground for warring nations. The muffola ovens were abandoned. The secrets of lustro died with its masters. But the Italian passion for beauty in all its radiant glory did not.
WHEN ITALY EMERGED as an independent state in 1861, its artists and artisans recognized that the new nation, long divided and dominated by foreign states, needed a unifying cultural foundation. A movement, called Cinquecentismo (from cinquecento—the five hundreds—which translates as “the 1500s” in English), looked to the Renaissance for inspiration.
Paolo Rubboli (1838–1890), descended from generations of ceramicists, found a treasure in his family’s workshop—a book, written in 1583, that described, step by step, the technique for producing lustro ceramics. He was convinced that he could re-create this dazzling finish—if he could build a specialized muffola oven. But this would require the support of an entire village. He found it in postcard-pretty Gualdo Tadino near the mountainous border between Umbria and Marche.
“It wasn’t just about art,” Maurizio Tittarelli Rubboli says as he shows me the letter his great-grandfather wrote to the village’s governing council. “It was about bringing back to life an art that would bring glory to the new nation.”
Even though it had no ceramic traditions of its own, Gualdo Tadino welcomed Paolo and his wife, Daria, also an accomplished ceramicist. In the 1880s, they constructed a specialized muffola oven and, through endless hours of trial and error, mastered the painstaking lustro technique. Gualdo Tadino gained such renown for “the miracle of iridescence” that dozens of potters moved to the village to set up their own kilns, gain access to the Rubboli muffola, and add a “blaze of glory” to their works.
When Paolo died unexpectedly at age fifty-two, many artisans wanted to move the lustro oven to another town. But Daria refused and continued her husband’s tradition for thirty years, expanding its range to tea services and belle donne vases painted with pretty women.
“Think of her passion!” says Maurizio, a soft-spoken and thoughtful artisan and teacher, with blackberry eyes that sparkle in admiration. “She was a woman with three young children, on her own and running a business in a remote mountain village.”
In 1889, Daria submitted several works to a major design exposition—and won the top prize. The certificate, which Maurizio proudly displays, is made out to “Signor Dario,” rather than “Signora Daria,” because the judges didn’t believe a woman could produce such work. An art catalog from the time lauded her as “La maestra” (the mistress) of the third firing.
At its peak in the 1920s, some sixty ceramicists filled the Rubboli studio, working upstairs and down and spilling outside in the summer months. As Gualdo Tadino ceramics gained international recognition, the village prospered—until the devastation of the Second World War and the collapse of Italy’s economy.
“My uncles and their daughters made beautiful works with the highest level of craftsmanship, but there was no market for them,” says Maurizio. In 1955, they were forced to close the business. Their studio, the Fabbrica Rubboli, fell into ruin, the old kiln built by his great-grandparents abandoned, their molds and tools heaped in corners.
YET THEIR PASSION LIVED ON. Maurizio, a prizewinning ceramicist featured in the prestigious Il libro d’oro dell’eccellenza artigiana italiana (The Golden Book of Italian Artisanal Excellence), was determined not to let his family’s legacy fade away. “I became a ceramicist for reasons tied to my past and my family, but also to this art, however intense and exhausting it may be,” he says. After working tirelessly to raise the needed funds, he opened the doors of the restored Museo Opificio Rubboli in 2015.
As we walk through its gracious rooms, Maurizio shows me a self-portrait of his great-grandfather Paolo, with classic features similar to his own portrayed on a glazed plate. I marvel at bowls, platters, pitchers, cups, vases, and jewelry boxes from the last hundred years. Then we enter the soot-blackened chamber that houses the muffola, the last remaining oven of its type in the world.
Maurizio talks me through the steps he follows to re-create his great-grandfather’s difficilissima technique: Donning baggy, flame-resistant overalls and a mask to protect himself from smoke and burning embers, he places a twice-baked piece of pottery inside the circular oven and ignites bundles of ginestra (similar to Scotch broom) to create a smoky fire no hotter than 650 degrees Fahrenheit. Heeding his mother’s instruction to always “let the muffola breathe,” he waits as each batch of twigs burns itself out. With no precise gauge, he relies on experience and periodic peeks through various “spy holes” to determine when the firing is complete. Then he clears the embers, leaves the ceramic in the oven overnight—and waits.
The next morning, Maurizio removes a dark, ash-covered blob and starts polishing. Like Aladdin with his magic lamp, he rubs and rubs until the ceramic glows as if sprinkled with stardust. Although modern methods such as resins can produce shiny finishes, none equals the Rubboli lustro that gleams as brightly today as it did centuries ago. A critic, proffering what he undoubtedly thought was high praise, commented that Maurizio’s creations are of such extraordinary beauty that “one forgets that they also serve a practical function.”
So are they works of fine art or of skilled craftsmanship? I can’t imagine eating from one of Maurizio’s glistening plates—although I certainly can appreciate the sheer visual delight of looking at one every day. The same question applies to Venice’s hand-carved oarlocks, created for gondolas but now mainly purchased as decorations, and Sardinia’s engraved shepherd’s knives, prized by collectors who’ve never ventured onto a sheep ranch. Should we evaluate them on the basis of their functionality or their aesthetic appeal? And what of their creators—are they artisans or artists?
The debate rages on, but I agree with the categorization that San Francesco d’Assisi offered centuries ago: “He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is an artisan. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
This distinction came to life for me in a fifteenth-century palazzo in Perugia that has served as home and studio for five generations of passionate Italians determined to elevate an abandoned craft to the realm of art.
AFTER SOARING TO SPLENDOR in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, “staining” glass was eclipsed in the Renaissance. While brilliant innovations transformed other arts, glass painters continued to decorate windows with the same techniques passed on by previous generations.
Francesco Moretti (1833–1917), convinced that stained glass could and should rise to the level of true art, broke with tradition. Although you may not know his name, if you’ve visited the grand churches of Umbria—San Domenico in Perugia, Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi, the cathedrals of Orvieto and Todi—and looked up, you’ve seen windows he either restored or created.
A sculpted bust of the man behind these works greets me in the reception room of Perugia’s Museo Laboratorio di Vetrate Artistiche Moretti Caselli. Every inch the Victorian gentleman, Moretti stares intently through rimless pince-nez glasses, one hand stroking his thick, chest-length beard, the other holding a book. If he were to return to life, he could get right back to work in this combination of Geppetto’s workshop, chemist’s laboratory, and artist’s studio.
Jars of pigments, blotched with faded colors, fill the cupboards. Centuries-old books and technical journals cram the shelves. Stacks of sketches, drawings, clippings, and photographs occupy every surface. Mounted on the walls are tools for several trades, all essential for stained glass: a painter’s brushes, a smithy’s tongs, a sculptor’s mallet. Along one wall stands a potter’s kiln, used to “bake” the colors in repeated firings.
Beyond the laborious technique, stained glass requires its own special alchemy—the mixing of color and light to bring to life a work that can express itself fully only in a ray of sunshine. By tireless experimenting, Moretti expanded the glass painter’s palette from a few basic colors to shades of every hue, as nuanced as Leonardo’s oils. With resolute passion, he set out to demonstrate to the world that a true masterpiece could be made with glass and lead, not just with paint and canvas.
MORETTI PROVED HIS PREMISE in 1881 with a single work—not a religious or mythological scene, but an almost life-size depiction of the most important Italian woman of the day: Queen Margherita. At first glance of this portrait in glass, I, like many visitors, assume it must be a painting or even a photograph. The face seems too dynamic, the elaborate gown with its layers of ruffles too detailed, the colors, especially the range of intense blues, too vibrant to be anything else.
Most remarkably, there are almost no visible traces of lead—or so I think until Maddalena Forenza, Moretti’s great-grandniece, points out very thin borders tucked under the regent’s arms and along her sides. Backlit by the sun, the enameled glass glows with a brilliance no other medium could capture. As Maddalena says quietly, “La regina vive!” (The queen lives!).
She calls my attention to a gold bracelet gleaming on the royal wrist. “It’s not possible to paint gold on glass,” Maddalena explains, “so Moretti created a base, then added a little yellow, then dots of blue that make a shadow and create gold when the light shines on it.” This level of perfection, she notes, marks his Portrait of Queen Margaret of Savoy as a true work of art.
Exhibited only three times—in Rome (where the queen herself admired it), Milan, and London—the fragile glass panel has remained in Moretti’s studio. “Transporting it is very risky,” Maddalena says. “It’s like thinking of moving The Last Supper from Milan.”
Moretti passed on his craft to his nephew, Maddalena’s great-grandfather, who instructed his two daughters, who in turn taught the art of glass painting to their niece, her mother. While still in the womb, Maddalena comments with a smile, she absorbed her mother’s passion for staining glass. As soon as she grew tall enough to reach a worktable, she began “helping.”
Now the primary keeper of the family flame and an accomplished artist in her own right, Maddalena, with finely etched Modigliani features and dark hair spinning into cherub curls, juggles her own commissions, motherhood, and coordination of the efforts to maintain Moretti’s legacy.
“There is never enough time,” she says, “but the most important thing I want to do is to pass on my family’s passion for this art and this place so people understand it, maintain it, and hold it dear.”
THE ITALIAN CITY most closely tied to the history of glass—and a passion for it—is Venice, where glassmakers perfected its fragile beauty. Kings wanted Venetian glass for their palaces; bishops and cardinals, for their altars; nobles, for their weddings and banquets. African and Asian countries used Venetian beads for currency. Columbus reportedly bought safe passage through treacherous waters with the city’s prized rosetta beads.
On a gray winter morning, I motor in a water taxi to the Venetian island of Murano, home of the Venetian glass furnaces since the thirteenth century. The doge chose this isolated location to protect citizens from fires sparked by the blazing kilns and to safeguard the secrets of the trade, so valuable that revealing them was punishable by death.
In the “piazza,” or furnace room, of Seguso Vetri d’Arte, a family enterprise that has been manufacturing glass since 1397, I watch master craftsmen weave wordlessly to and fro like the nimble members of a corps de ballet. Amid clangs, whirs, and a high-pitched shriek, they heat blobs of red-hot glass at the end of long poles, then twirl them into curlicues, threads, leaves, and shells.
“Why glass?” I ask.
“Il vetro è come Venezia” (Glass is like Venice), one of the workers explains, a city surrounded by water, built on sand, with fire in its soul, filled with color and beauty. In glass, these elements come together in splendid equilibrium—the fire balancing the water, the sand mixing with the air.
In the years after Napoleon’s conquest and again after each world war, Venice’s glass industry seemed doomed, but it always sprang back to life. Although far fewer in number, today’s glassmakers display their works in major museums and teach classes throughout the world. Among these modern maestri, one stands apart.
“So you are looking for passion,” says my guide Cristina Gregorin, a font of Venetian history and culture, as we duck into a narrow lane off Murano’s main street to the workshop of Lucio Bubacco. “Here is Venice’s premier erotic glass artist!”
IN THE FIRST DIZZYING MOMENTS inside Bubacco’s studio, I feel that I have been transported into Casanova’s psyche. Everywhere I look—tables, shelves, walls, ceiling—I see vibrant colors, delicate forms, astounding complexity. Clutching my purse to avert any collisions, I realize that I am surrounded by glass variations of Venetian nudes.
Unlike Titian’s reclining goddesses, Bubacco’s uninhibited men and women—many just a few inches tall—dance, leap, and pirouette, heads flung back, legs floating in air, arms outstretched ecstatically. Some sprout devil ears, tails, and pitchforks; others flutter with angel wings and halos. Revelers grasp goblets of wine with tiny crystal drops splashing from the rim. An openmouthed swan’s head tops the torso of a bosomy woman. These fantastical creatures exude a carnal energy, a dynamism that flows from within. This, I realize, is Bubacco’s genius: he has breathed sensual passion into glass.
Burly and broad-shouldered, with gray hair slicked back, eyeglasses dangling on a cord around his neck, and a ready laugh, Bubacco tells me that he became a glassmaker like his father “per caso” (by chance). Every exquisite cornice or column he saw as a boy rowing in the lagoon, every story he read in Dante and Boccaccio, every exuberant Etruscan wall painting he studied was seared into his imagination. To transmute these visions into tangible forms, he had to develop entirely new ways of working with “soft” glass.
Rather than the roaring oven in the “piazza,” Bubacco uses a lamp worker’s handheld torch, pincers, scissors, and other simple tools. At his workbench, he deftly wields a 1,500-degree flame to melt a gob of red-hot glass into a torso.
“You have to tame the glass as if it were an animal,” he explains. “You control it with the flame and take it where you want it to go.” With deft turns of glowing glass, thighs lengthen into legs. Arms stretch outward. Breasts sprout. Buttocks curve into apple roundness. With a few snips of the pincer, hands extend into graceful fingers. A shapeless mound turns into a head with a pert nose, full lips, and a beaded necklace. The entire process seems organic, as if energy is flowing directly from artist to flame to figure, from the rhythmic act of creation to the work itself.
Despite his international success, Bubacco bristles at those who dismiss his florid style as overly graphic (some say pornographic), kitsch, or craft. “I could earn much more money making abstract forms in glass, but I do not do this for money. I have to do this to express what is inside me, to make real the visions that are inside my head.”
“So you do it for passion?” I ask.
“Certo,” he replies. “I want the people who see my art to have a real encounter—to touch it, caress it, understand the shapes and movements. I want them to experience what I feel for my art: passion and love.”
That evening, at dinner at Ristorante da Ivo, tucked into Venice’s warren of waterways, I recognize a familiar object displayed under a spotlight. An unmistakable Lucio Bubacco glass sculpture, radiant in shades of blue and white, captures the ebullience of dancers—naked, of course—frolicking in uninhibited delight. Walking into the night, I feel the same energy in the Carnevale revelers who twirl around me in capes and masks.
AS I’VE WATCHED MAESTRI of glass, clay, silk, and other media work, I’ve come to think of them as Italy’s unsung cultural heroes. Spending time in their studios has changed my view of the world. As if borrowing their eyes, I now look at the simplest things—a slab of wood, a clump of clay, a skein of thread—and see new possibilities.
“It’s a labor of love,” says Francesca Trubbianelli, a jeweler in Assisi, who shows me drawers of leaves and jars of pebbles she collects in the nearby woods as inspiration for her creations. “Each piece is unique, with its own character, smell, organic makeup. It’s gratifying to touch the things of the earth and feel them take on new life in my hands.”
In the Museo Atelier Giuditta Brozzetti, in Perugia’s repurposed Church of San Francesco delle Donne, Marta Cucchia, a fourth-generation weaver, sits at an antique loom like a virtuoso at a piano, working the lever and threads like a keyboard.
“A passion? Yes—but more,” she says in response to my question. “Work like this is about identity, about our role in the universe. Crafts are part of Italy’s patrimony. If we lose them, we lose part of our soul.”
I think of Italian souls whenever I see or touch the many objects made by Italian hands in our California home, each imbued with memories: a polished black-and-tan marble globe from a windswept mountain above Carrara. A lighter-than-air necklace of clear glass beads fashioned by Susanna and Marina Sent, daughters of a Venetian glassblower. A collection of inlaid wooden boxes from the Italian lakes. A ceramic trinket from a young woman whose mother created classic Deruta designs. Obsidian earrings from the Aeolian islands.
A recent gift, an exquisite hand-printed book with sketches of the flora of Tuscany, takes me back to a hillside in the Val d’Orcia where I spent a day with a true Renaissance man. A chemist by training, Annibale Parisi has expressed his artistic passions in paintings, collages, sculptures, pipes of wood and cork, and entire rooms of furniture. In his home library, a sculpted wooden “tree” covers a wall with branches holding hand-carved “books” that open—like Joseph Cornell boxes—to reveal leaves, nuts, seeds, nests, and bark from particular trees.
Annibale’s latest passion combines art and wine. For each of the five thousand bottles of Brunello wines produced every year by his NostraVita winery in Montalcino, he hand-paints a unique label. As I watch, he grasps a brush to create an abstract image in four symbolic colors, explaining the meaning of each as he works: ruddy brown, for the earth; black, for working and “getting your hands dirty”; shimmering white, for the illumination of the sun; and deep red, for passion. And this, he reminds me, regardless of what one makes, is always the most crucial element of all.
I think of the phrase il filo rosso, which Italians use for “the red thread” that pulls together many different things with a unifying theme. This is indeed what the artisanal form of la passione italiana does. Italy’s craftspeople reach back to the past to preserve ancient traditions, enrich the present with their creations, and light the way to the future with their innovations, all in the oldest of ways—with their hands.