La Passione by Dianne Hales

Author:Dianne Hales
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

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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.

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