On one of our free days in Italy we took the bus to the lovely city of Lucca and stopped on the way at one of the famed Villas of Lucca that are nestled in the surrounding rolling hills. “Our” villa was the Villa Mansi, built by a family that made their fortune in the silk trade.

This beautiful building is in a storybook, parklike setting, surrounded by stately trees-all imported from Japan and Asia.

Did you know that the symbol of Tuscany, the cypress tree actually comes from Asia!? Just a little Tuscany trivia.

Inside, all of the rooms were beautifully painted in different styles including Chinoiserie and Grotessca.

The grand dining room was jaw-dropping, however. The bas relief trompe l’oeil painting was so well executed you just wanted to get up their and dust off the carvings.

As you can see from the crack in the wall in this detail, though, that wouldn’t be necessary. Amazing art in a magical place. By the way, they are working on renovating the upstairs to rent out the entire Villa, so gather you friends together for the vacation of your dreams. PS, thanks to Carlo Mori and Eva LaRue for taking better photos than me!

Our little Florentine Silk Damask room turned out divinely. Interestingly and fortuitously enough, they seem to like to put showers right in the thick of things in their bathrooms in Italy-so you have a toilette, a sink and there in the corner a shower head coming right out of the wall with a drain on the floor. This works GREAT for cleaning big stencils as there is not need to try and squish them into a pesky little sink.

Here’s Debbie and Lori doing one of many repeats of damask around the room, along with a final photo.

And here’s Gary in one of his favorite spots-sandwiched between a bevy of beautiful babes, namely: Becky, Kari, moi, Alison and Jeanine. You lucky, lucky man. 

So, yeah, Italy was amazing! We were really lucky to be accompanied by a fabulous group of 30 people. Now, that may seem like a lot-it sure did to me-and we were working in a smallish space but I’ve never seen a group of diverse people work so well together. We were able to get an incredible amount of work done in a week and there were smiles all around all the time. Maybe it had something to do with the many bottles of red wine on our lunch tables. Hmmm?

This is my favorite shot. Do you think that they are engaging in some girl talk? Naw, probably discussing trowelling techniques. Speaking of that, we did quite a bit of it on this 250 sq. ft. floor area.

Racing to the finish line.

All hands on deck.

Me posing (just a little)

Susan and Todd (who really never did stop smiling)

A pattern picking party. I think many were looking for the opportunity to sit down at this point!

Ta da! The floor turned out to be seriously gorgeous. We were all wishing we could take it home but happy to leave our mark in lovely Florence. A very special Thank You to Modern Masters for their generous donation of SkimStone for this major Modello project that uses one of our Ornamental Allover patterns, OrnAll 107.

Sgraffito is a decorative technique that involves layering contrasting colors of lime plaster. While still wet, the design is scratched into the top layer of the lighter colored plaster and then the negative spaces of the design are removed to reveal the darker layer underneath. You can imagine the time and skill involved in managing this type of artform, particularly as it was accomplished across the entire facade of a building. There are still buildings in Florence that bear this beautiful and intricate artform, dating as far back as the 15th century. It was at that time that many fanciful frescoed examples from ancient Rome were found, now buried in underground cavelike rooms (’grottoes’) after thousands of years of development. The discovery of these stuccowork motifs of flora, fauna and monstrous figures inspired many decorative artists at the time, who began incorporating these motifs into their work on a large scale and referred to them as ‘grotesques”.

The 16th century artist who is credited with the invention of the grotesque compositions in black and white sgraffito is Andrea di Cosimo Feltrini, who directed a flourishing workshop that specialized in the decoration of furniture, textiles, coats of arms, interiors and was particularly renowned for its scraffito facade grotesques. I snapped the photo above on a street in Oltrarno, but there is a lovely book available on the subject, The Painted Facades of Florence, that is filled with the history and motifs of this classic Florentine artform.

  

I particularly enjoy the photo shown just above as you can clearly see where the artist either forgot or ran out of time or daylight to carve out the final small details of the egg and dart molding. We will be attempting to create a faux sgraffito finish in the bathrooms at Alison’s studio. By that I mean that we will create the look not by using a removal technique, but rather applying the plaster in layers using stencils and Modellos. The silvery-black and white coloration should look really handsome with the blue tile already on the walls!

Located at 4 Via Bartolini, the Florence silk factory and showroom of Antico Setificio Fiorentino (Antique Florentine Silk Factory) is a lovely little time capsule. Everything about it: The buildings, the interiors, the patterns, the fabrics, even the profusely blooming wisteria growing up the wall has the look of unstudied perfection. Here is the place where they still weave silk fabrics by hand on wooden looms, just as they did at the height of the Renaissance.

In fact, a visit to the Uffizi gallery down the street to study the paintings of the masters can also be a study of the silk damasks, brocades and the iridescent ermisino that clothe and adorn the painting’s subjects and participants and are painted with exquisite detail. 

Alison and I visited the Antico Setificio on my recent Italy trip to get some inspiration for some of the designs for wall finishes we will be doing in her studio in San Bartolo on our October group trip. We will be doing one room with a combination of plasters and metallic waxes to replicate the look textural/smooth damasks that the factory creates (and that sell for upwards of $400/yd.) Another high-ceilinged room will have a deep frieze that resembles a valance similar in look to some of their custom fabrications for canopy beds that feature elaborate banding and trims. The factory is located in the Oltrarno area of Florence, close to many of the other artisan workshops. They welcome visitors here. You just have to ring the bell. If you can’t visit in person, there is a richly illustrated book available (sold only through them) and it’s photographs are featured here.

Still on the second floor of the National Museum of Rome: Wall frescoes from the Villa della Farnesina. After coming home and doing some more research on this, I have found that these frescoes from the 3rd century were discovered and excavated in the late 18th century from the gardens of the current Villa della Farnesina. This villa, built in the Trastevere area of Rome on the banks of the Tiber was a quite large residential villa surrounded by lush gardens. They have been able to reconstruct several rooms from it at the museum, albeit with many pieces missing. 

Behind a long glass case, they have assembled what is left of a long wall of panels and columns, part of which it shown above.

My favorite “antiquities” photo from the whole trip is the small, fractured piece of the delicate column base shown above, right. It’s hard to imagine how it would have felt to be surrounded daily by that much artistic and natural beauty!

The more recent Renaissance version of Villa della Farnesina is open to the public. In fact, there are many Roman Villas, many containing beautiful botanical gardens that are available for touring and can provide a welcome brake from the zipping cars and throngs of pedestrians and fill the streets and sidewalks of Rome. Since I tossed a coin into the Trevi fountain over my back, I am guaranteed a return to Rome some day and may make it a “Villa” trip!

Well, I am back from Italy much to quickly. I really miss the authentic cappucinos and the tangy yogurt, among a million other things! What I found I didn’t miss as much was not being tied to a computer and checking my email 100 times a day, so I am finding it a bit hard to get back into my electronic routines! My son dabbles in mosaics, so I was really excited to take him to the National Museum of Rome at the Palazzo Massimo. I’ve written about it here already, but I find the recovered antiquities there so stunning I’m going to post about it again!

They have an amazing collection of mosaic pavements that were mostly discovered in the ruins of residential buildings of the city and suburbs of Rome around the end of the 19th century. Some of them are in near-perfect condition and the colors and quality of craftsmanship are amazing! While many examples there are of simpler, graphic designs that use black tesserae on a white background (less expensive and time consuming to produce), there are also many examples of more complicated polycrome techniques, like the ones shown above. The details and modeling that they were able to achieve with tiny, perfect squares of stone and marble is simply stunning. I especially love the ochres with blue-greens and the way they were able to achieve the classic egg and dart moldings. It’s inspiring and humbling all at once.

I wrote about my upcoming trip to Italy on the Art of Living blog, but wanted to talk a bit more about the project here. I am going to Rome and on to Florence next week to sort out the details of a trip that Gary Lord and I are hosting for a group of students next October. 

We have joined up with Alison Woolley Bulkghalter (whose exquisite work is shown above) to plan a program around doing some painted decoration in her new studio that is housed in a former small theatre built in the 1800’s. Alison runs a Florentine painting studio and offers art courses year round, both there and at the Maiano estate, where we will be staying.

We will be using a decorative motif that was originally on the plaster ceilings and adapting it to create a design for a “faux marble” floor pattern that will be done with an integrally colored concrete overlayment. This will be set off with trompe l’oeil paneling around the dado with plaster columns. The back rooms will receive wall finishes designed to replicate the local Florentine silk fabrics. More about that “manana”, I mean “domani”. Oh yeah! Gotta start crammin on that Italian language CD.