Restoration
WHERE IT WASN'T, AS IT WASN'T
I got there by motorbike in June 2019, two months after the Notre-Dame fire, and didn't connect the two. It took me seven years.
Architecture
Essays that read a place slowly: how it’s made, why it’s made that way, what it hides. Cathedrals, ideal cities, palaces and thresholds, mostly in Italy.
Architecture
VILLA D’ESTE — THE OTHER SIDE: FRESCOES, AUTOMATA, MYSTERIES
At the gate of Bomarzo a sphinx asks whether marvels are made by deception or by art. Take her to Villa d'Este: the palace is painted to lie, the fountains play music and birdsong, and the man who designed it all invented inscriptions. Room by room, the other side of the garden.
Architecture
VILLA D'ESTE — WATER AS A BUILDING MATERIAL
Villa d'Este is not a garden with fountains. It is a hydraulic machine, and a map you can walk, built between six lost conclaves by a man who never got to Rome, and who brought Rome home instead.
Restoration
AS IT WAS — BUT WHEN?
I was sitting under St Mark's Campanile and I knew it dates from 1912. It was no use to me, until Notre-Dame put the right question in front of me.
Architecture
CAPRAROLA — THE FRESCOES AS A POLITICAL MANIFESTO
Read in order, the rooms of Caprarola stop being decoration and become an argument: from the Farnese lands to the map of the world, from the cardinal's family history to a room where a whisper crosses the corners.
Architecture
THE CATHEDRAL WITHOUT SHADOWS
I walked into Notre-Dame and found it flat. Then I discovered that the man who designed its light calls himself a sculptor of shadows.
Strata
THE APPIAN WAY — THE ROAD ON TOP OF A VOLCANO
On the Appian Way you ride higher than the fields. It isn't an impression: you are on the back of a lava flow that stopped exactly where the tomb of Caecilia Metella stands.
Architecture
BOMARZO — THE GARDEN THAT DOESN'T EXPLAIN ITSELF
Every great sixteenth-century garden answers your questions before you ask them. Bomarzo doesn't. On the wood without an axis, and the grief that built it.
Restoration
CIVITA DI BAGNOREGIO — THE INVISIBLE ARCHITECTURE
There is a map of Civita no guidebook shows: everything that fell into the valley. A Latvian-American architect, a Sienese theorist and the engineers in the rock kept the rest standing, without pretending it was whole.
Architecture
SABBIONETA — THE CITY TOO BIG FOR ITS LIFE
The most perfect city I have ever seen, and I would never live there. Sabbioneta, the Ideal City of Urbino, Brasília and Gibellina: why cities live for the where, not the how.
Architecture
PALAZZO TE — RULE AND LICENCE
Mantua, empty in mid-August. The facade of Palazzo Te is brick and plaster pretending to be stone, and in the courtyard the triglyphs are slipping out of the frieze. Giulio Romano spent ten years building an order that fails on cue — and had to leave Rome to be allowed to do it.
Essay
SIENA — THE CITY THAT NEVER REALLY LOST
Tuscany's second city, they say — as if that were a ranking that mattered. Siena lost the wars, kept the shape, and built an invisible river to stay alive. Walk it and it doesn't feel like a place that lost anything.