LOOK INSIDE: In Italy

2

Laurie Olin

IN ITALY Sketches & Drawings

SKETCHBOOK SERIES 2

Laurie Olin and Pablo Mandel, editors

ORO Editions Publishers of Architecture, Art, and Design Gordon Goff: Publisher www.oroeditions.com info@oroeditions.com Published by ORO Editions, an imprint of ORO Group Ltd. Copyright © 2023 ORO Editions, Laurie Olin, Pablo Mandel.

Copyright on book design © 2023 Pablo Mandel.

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Text: Laurie Olin Editors: Laurie Olin and Pablo Mandel Book design: Pablo Mandel Copy editor: Julia Van den Hout ORO Managing Editor: Kirby Anderson Typeset in Lyon Text Printed on 140 gsm Sun woodfree paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition Library of Congress data available upon request. World Rights: Available ISBN: 978-1-957183-83-1 Color Separations and Printing: ORO Editions, Inc. Printed in China.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

7

North

11

Veneto

23

FOOD

57

Tuscany

69

Umbria

97

Rome

107

FOUNTAINS

157

Bernini & Borromini

167

TREES

183

Lazio

193

HOME OF THE GODS

209

Campania

223

Sicilia

229

VIVA ITALIA

253

For Victoria

6

Introduction I first went to Italy to study the urban landscape of Rome in hopes of learning how to improve American cities. I was thirty-four and looking for change as well. Two years living on the Janiculum and traveling the Italian countryside changed my life in many ways for the better. It greatly informed my subsequent years in landscape architecture.

A wonderful way to learn is simply to plunge into a place, to be there and draw. Drawing is more about looking carefully and seeing than some trick of the wrist or hand. This book is about drawing. It is also about some of the many facets of life in Italy. It is a celebration not a guidebook. Inevitably, it is also about the pleasure I’ve had being in Italy, its cities, towns, landscape, and life. I was schooled as an architect, and Italy is a repository of thousands of years of superb architecture. Many of my earliest sketches, notes, and drawings from Italy were made as I was shifting my professional interest to landscape architecture, hence an unending interest in building, architecture, form, history, and a growing attention to landscape and gardens—then and now.

Why Italy? Why drawings? Good questions, but not difficult to answer. The drawings in this book present aspects of a world made by human society over thousands of years in a land that has witnessed change and tumult, genius and disaster, good and bad intentions, good and bad fortune, folly, wisdom, art, craft, invention, and accident. The manner of the drawings varies: some are brief notations, quick sketches; others are more elaborate, even painstaking; in different media—presenting the residue of time and curious nature of people, including me. What different artists and writers through time have chosen to see and reflect upon in Italy has taken wide variation in form and per-

Tempus fugit, memento mori, Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte, Rome

spective providing diversity of insight. These drawings are a selection of 7

Opera — In Italian, opera means “work,” both in the sense of labor and product, deriving from the Latin singular noun, opera, and the plural of the noun opus.

Disegno — In Italian, disegno means “drawing,” disegno also means “design.”

some of the things I have seen, sought out, or unexpectantly come upon and have had the privilege of time to draw over a period of fifty years.

They are, like life, an ongoing series of experiments, often an exploration.

Wandering among the ruins of a great empire, looking at its imprint and shards, and subsequent cultures piled atop it, the art and architecture of each, can be sobering. It provides perspective, and suggests consideration of the passions and fashions of eras that produced works often inconceivable or impossible to make today that continue to stir our senses and spirit, such as prodded Shelley to write Ozymandias in 1817 on seeing a colossal head of Ramesses II at the British Museum. Likewise, eating dishes providing delight and health, which have been made continuously with the same ingredients for a millennium or more in the same location and identical manner is worth equal consideration. Italy is the home of modernity and ancient memory, where western art, commerce, and politics moved on from Medieval life and thought. Rome, truly the “Eternal City,” is an eternal mess and confusion, providing food for thought as well as the body and senses. So too, the multiplicity of contesting regions, cities, and landscapes of this remarkable peninsula and islands in the Mediterranean Sea remains vibrant and provocative.

Like the product of many artists, composers, architects, landscape and garden designers, who have lived in Italy or visited, these sketches are part of a record of having been alive in this time. They represent an unending curiosity about the nature of places, things, and moments that caught my attention and caused me to pause in the headlong rush of life, to sit still, look carefully, and draw.

Giardino Villa Aurelia, Rome

8

9

26

Veneto

Library, Piazzetta, Campanile, San Marco, and Doge’s Palace, Grand Canal, Venice

27

Roofs, apartment interior, and fondamenta di San Nicolò Mendicoli, Dorsoduro, Venice

28

Veneto

29

56

Introduction

Food

INTERLUDE

Italy possesses a wealth of complex and subtle dishes with many regional specialties of consistent quality and thoughtful, often simple, fresh ingredients, found in many markets, large and small. Wheat, olives, grapes, citrus, and a handful of spices have been fundamental in the cultural evolution and physical survival of the population adjacent to the Mediterranean for millennia. Fish from the nearby sea, ubiquitous poultry, acorn-fed swine in northern forests supplying ham and prosciutto, along with sheep, goats, and cattle have been in the diet since the Bronze Age, with the latter as important for milk to make cheese and the production of wool, leather, as meat.

Italy is unimaginable without pasta. For a thousand years the Romans and others grew wheat, which was used for bread. Despite old jokes about Marco Polo, and which direction journeying between Italy and China he introduced noodles, East or West; there is no doubt that sometime in, or just before, the Renaissance along with other developments in art, literature, technology, and science, improved forms of pasta, including spaghetti, appeared. Global exploration and trade also added tomatoes, corn,

potatoes, and turkeys from America along with rice and spices from Asia to the palette.

The slow food movement that began in Bologna as a protest against globalization in agribusiness, and the consolidation of corporate marketing, packaging, fast food, and their devastating effect upon farmers, markets, restaurants, and health, has generated significant international response. The ongoing global expansion of interest in local growers, farmers’ markets, regional and historic crops and livestock, traditional and nutritious cuisine has been nothing short of miraculous.

Italy has a variety and hierarchy of places to snack or eat. First is the ubiquitous neighborhood café/ bar, where people pop in for a quick espresso, pastry, biscotto, or panino which can be heated in a large hot press grill (or microwave). Next is the tavola calda (hot table), with cooked, grilled, or baked dishes such as lasagna, and a variety of vegetables—eggplant, zucchini, potatoes, carrots—as well as pizza slices, and grilled meats, where one can step in off the street and be served a hot meal quickly, while standing at a counter or perched at one of a few

Afternoon tea, coffee, and gelato, Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome

57

62

Food

Carciofi from Terracina, Rome 63

Count Origo’s zig-zag road, La Foce, Val D’Orcia

76

Tuscany

77

Above: Terrace parterre with lemons; below: plan of Villa Medici, Castello; middle right: dining terrace and garden Villa La Foce, Val D’Orcia; far right: kitchen window, Castiglion Fibocchi

84

Tuscany

85

122

Rome

Left: Seventeenth-century Casino del Bel Respiro in the Villa Doria Pamphili

by Alessandro Algardi and Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi; above: Seventeenth-century Farnese villa, now Villa Aurelia of The American Academy, Rome

123

Above: Cecil Pinsent’s grotto fountain at Villa La Foce, Tuscany; Opposite above: Fountain in Piazza del Rotonda

by Jacopo della Porta with later obelisk; opposite below: Bartolomeo Ammannati’s Nymphaeum, Villa Giulia, Rome

158

go midweek on a cold morning in January or February. The sun will appear, and water will be gushing, splashing, and flowing, the tritone (mermen) will be blowing their conches, and hippogriffs (seahorses) will be plunging. Oceanus will be in charge, and the palazzo behind will be melting into the rocks and cliffs of the shore. One of the greatest works of late Baroque artistry and theater, it took thirty years for architects, sculptors, hydraulic engineers, masons, property owners, and ecclesiastics to pull together and finally complete it in 1762. By then Rome was broke, Baroque was over, the world had moved on. Principally the work of an architect, Nicolo Salvi, transforming a facade of the Palazzo Poli, it’s the termination of the Aqua Virgo, originally built by Agrippa in the first century.

Trevi is a superb example of continuity, layering of fashion cycles, and evolution in art and behavior, as featured prominently in several twentieth-century films: Three Coins in a Fountain promulgated the tradition of tourists throwing coins over their shoulder into the fountain while making a wish to return; in Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn spots a barber while passing Trevi and decides to get a haircut; and in an iconic moonlit scene in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Anita Ekberg—a baroque creature herself in an evening gown—takes a wet

stroll with Marcello Mastroianni in the fountain, inspiring generations to jump in, resulting in frequent police whistles.

Rome has simple, humble fountains, amusing ones, bombastic ones. Bernini participated in several of the best. One, done with his father, Pietro, a hydraulic engineer and stone carver, is at the base of the Spanish steps. A representation of work boats on the Tiber at the opposite end of the via Condotti, it’s noticeably lower than the modern pavement, because it is the end of an aqueduct fed by gravity and cannot be higher. Others include the Fontana del Moro, in Piazza Navona, the Tritone in the Piazza Barberini, and a simpler, early work in the Piazza de Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Accommodating a papal obsession of erecting Egyptian obelisks, Bernini produced fanciful studies combining them with fountains. His most famous fountain is the Quatro Fiume (four rivers) with the Tiber, Nile, Amazon, and Ganges representing Europe, Africa, America, and Asia personified in gigantic figures, plus representations of tropical and desert plants and a noble seahorse rising from an oceanic cave. The towering weight of the obelisk is suspended theatrically above a void and torrents of water.

Another favorite, the Fontanone on the Janiculum, recently featured in the opening sequence of the film

Fountains

159

Cascade from Catena d’Acqua to basin with river Gods, Villa Lante, Bagnaia

202

Lazio

203

222

Lazio

Campania Campo, field; campagna, the countryside. Campania, the territory surrounding Napoli or Naples, the principal city of the region since the Roman unification of Italy in antiquity, began as the Greek colony of Neopolis, or new city. Located in the center of the great arc made by the Bay of Naples, it sits at the base of its nemesis, Vesuvius, and marks the northern boundary of a region known as the Mezzogiorno extending south to the boot and Sicily. Mezzogiorno literally means midday, noon, supposedly because of the intensity of the sun there at that hour, but it also implies naptime, and to many Italian northerners, indolence, poverty, sloth, sly behavior or worse. Naples is vibrant with a life and art of its own, with overlays of Spanish and French influence resulting from their rule in the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Fierce, violent, indulgent—famous for criminality and danger. “See Naples and die,” an eighteenth-century tourist saying, referred to the hazards of a boquet of diseases, bandits, and potentially fatal meals, or the good chance of becoming blissed out from a surplus of delight, indulgent hedonism, and pleasure.

In addition to museums and palaces with spectacular collections of Classical art and Renaissance art, Baroque churches, hearses, and funerals, Naples is the ancestral home of Pulcinella, the poignant masked character of the comedia dell’arte, and the bitter, deceitful, violent Punch of beloved puppet shows. Its peppy, teasing, cheerful music and regional tarantella dance have inspired classical and pop composers alike, persist-

First and second temples to Hera, Paestum

ing at weddings and celebrations today and have been exported to Italian communities around the globe through waves of emigration, comedy, and gangster films.

Campania remains a region beloved for its beaches, water recreation, and sybaritic living, with contemporary resorts and villas situated along its mostly mountainous coast, bays, and islands atop and among the ruins of ancient pleasure venues, the porticus villas of Imperial Rome built on 223

Temple of Hera, Agrigento

236

Sicilia

237

Cloud, steam, and snow on Mount Etna seen from the Greek theater above Taormina

250

Sicilia

251