Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Slazenger Jack Nicholas

2 - Have you seen the walls?

Severgnini Here's another quote, again taken from The head of the Italians.
Have you seen the walls? Brick. Everywhere. Bricks in the eye. Brick similar in size and color. Brick on brick churches and the houses, brick on brick and restaurants on the inputs. But the Tuscan was a symphony of plaster, made with local materials, so as to bring the colors of the walls? Why, then, this skinning? I do not know, but I have a suspicion you like Italy [Severgnini is aimed at foreign-ed]-colored brick. And 'the reproduction of your winter dreams. We Italians have to offer it? Maybe not, but we do.
Our willingness to please is producing pretty disasters. Pienza and Montepulciano, and Cortona Casale Marittimo, Casole d'Elsa and San Gimignano: the most beautiful places were shelled with diligence. In trying to keep up Umbria (Spoleto, Città della Pieve, Assisi, even). The result is a strange perfection, a rustic / country is not where the modern neo-Tudor in Great Britain (there logs, bricks here). But the English, at least, is a revival. Ours is a fake.
The practice of skinning is not new. It dates from the nineteenth century and the myth of historicism. All monuments, until then, had plastered and painted it: even the stones and marbles were painted. Romanesque architecture were also covered with a thin plaster and then painted in imitation of brick. The ancients could not stand it that attracts us. The differences in color and finish materials in sight.
Why then remove the protective plaster walls? It 's like if we went around in a bathing suit in winter. When you see the usual brick arch that floats like a cork soprauna plastered facade, know that it is past the Skinner Gentile. When you enter in the farm with bricks yellow (it looks like housing in Watford: the English will feel at home), hailed the Apprentice Skinner. When v'imbattete in Pieve Desnuda, think: the architect who has tanned well acts as the Italian chef in New York puts it in the menu Fettuccine Alfredo. In Italy I am not asking anyone. But the Americans claim, and woe be to not provide them.
Explanations of the phenomenon? Psychological reasons (curiosity: Let's see what's below), psychoanalysis (the plaster as the dress of a loved one), economic (galling is it to work, and work means money). But I insist too often we choose to adapt the image of Italy fantasies of the guests. We offer a huge mental Tuscany, which begins and ends at the Tarvisio Trapani. We are now the world's largest producers of sensations. Maybe we should patent it and sell them: we could call in the sixth, the trade balance.

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