Italian Buildings; Italy, October 2016
These aren't the grand monuments of urban Italy; they are instead the sublimely inviting and attractive buildings that seem to fill the rural countryside and villages. They have strong lines, strong design, strong materials. They seem intended to last millennia. They use native materials and seem part of the land.
Stones are here arranged as artfully as a mosaic, fitted together, one at a time, as inevitably as if they had just been pulled from the earth. It is reassuring that a society should use artisans to build functional, even prosaic, local buildings. It is architectural lithography.
Roof tiles complement the terrain and foliage. The chimney is striking in its functional artistry, a minor but proud adornment.
Diagonals converge beyond the village street above, but the arch warms the utilitarian bridge over a steep alley.
On the right, strong verticals (emphasized by a very wide lens) show off intriguing color and window treatments. Below is another view of the house, in different light, and in context of the village.
This terrace is seemingly part of the land itself. It invites us to sit in the sun.
A village is less a collection of buildings than a close-knit community of structures, bound together in stone, built of stone, resting on stone, as though quarried on the spot.
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After a lifetime of mainly expressing myself with words, my postings here will mainly rely on images. They will speak for themselves to some extent, but I'll usually add a few comments of explanation. I've taken photographs for decades, since the 1950's, inspired in part by my father's photographic skill. Four years of photo assignments and quality darkroom time eventually gave way to decades of casual and family picture-taking. I re-immersed myself when I left film and turned to digital.