Monthly Archives: December 2011

Ligurian Heart

28 Wednesday Dec 2011

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Godzillavilla is in the Val di Vara, an area of Liguria where you still hear few languages other than Italian, even in high tourist season. It’s not quite on the international destination map.

The little town that could

Sometime around our fifth year in Italy I’d come across an article in Io Donna, a women’s magazine, about the valley and its main town, Varese Ligure. The photos were beautiful, its story more so. Like many rural valleys that twist their way into the central spine of the Apennines, it had experienced a population exodus post-war. Young people had moved to the larger towns for work, rejecting life on the land, and the towns became phantoms of their former selves.

By the 1980’s it was a dire situation. Then Varese Ligure’s enlightened government had a brilliant idea, well ahead of its time: since their valley was in the middle of nowhere and offered pretty much nothing, why not make something of that?

Making the most of the middle of nowhere

Through a remarkable application of both will and action, in 1999 the Val di Vara became Europe’s first valley to be certified ISO 14001, the international benchmark for environmental management. Chemical free, energy-sustaining, and boasting fine organic cheeses, produce and meat, it has become an organic haven in an industrial world.

People returned to take up organic farming, bee-keeping, and cheese-making. Varese Ligure, an ancient borgo with its own perfect castle and a unique, circular town plan, began to be spruced up. Good restaurants opened. Artists and craftspeople arrived. And so did we, drawn to its energy, inventiveness, and the purity of its landscape.

Varese Ligure’s story reflects the character of its people. What better folk to be around when attempting something as audacious as bringing Godzillavilla back to life? I’m hoping some of their resolve and resourcefulness rubs off on me. If they can resurrect a whole valley and its towns, surely resurrecting one old house is possible.

Varese's castle, still privately owned


The Priceless Heirloom

19 Monday Dec 2011

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While living in Italy we came across a lot of beautiful things, a few of which we acquired.  Furniture, paintings, terra cotta, and ceramics are some of the renowned Italian objects we picked up along the way. Somewhat less renowned, but somehow vastly more important, is the red plastic folding table we bought at a Milan DIY store.

We bought the blessed object for camping, and it has since become so imbued with memories that our kids declare this is the thing they’re going to fight over when we die. Here it is in all its glory presiding over the ‘garden’ at Godzillavilla, where we picnic when we’re there, and pretend we’re living in the villa.

For best view sit here

 

The Queen of patio furniture

Once Godzilla is restored and has her (dreamed of) stone patio instead of a weedy slope, I suppose we’ll get something more chic to sit on. The red table may eventually be downgraded to service in, say, the laundry area. But it will always be number one in our hearts!

 

Progress and the Supplicant Angel

12 Monday Dec 2011

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What a difference a roof makes. In Godzilla’s case that wasn’t just a case of putting on new tiles. The whole thing: wood beams, toxic insulation, and rotting cornice had to be replaced. We also took the opportunity to shore up the structure with iron reinforcement to keep the top of the house from falling apart. That felt rather important.

Usually I find replacing a roof to be the most dissatisfying of home reno expenditures, because usually it looks pretty much the same after, just a little fresher, while your bank account looks a whole lot worse. But this one made us all positively giddy, the difference was so great. The feeling that the house was now stable and dry, the effectiveness of the new insulation, the beauty of the materials – even the gutters are things of beauty with their slate overhang and copper piping.

Before

Lost 70 lbs of ugly building material!

I look at the before and after pictures and find the transformation even more unbelievable than those ads that show people who’ve experienced 70-lb weight loss.

A bonus: the old Y-junction that used to hold up Godzilla’s roof, married to a piece of discarded Rebar and a slice of gutter that looked just like an alms cup, has become the garden’s first sculpture: witness the Supplicant Angel. Unfortunately the cup has a hole in the bottom, so money flows right through…Godzilla’s perfect companion!

Donations accepted in bottomless cup

When is a House Like a Cake?

04 Sunday Dec 2011

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No, not the Gingerbread house – we managed to create a quintessentially Italian variety. When it came time to refinish the exterior stucco on Godzilla, we did a lot of research on types of plaster. The old stuff was an impoverished cement mix with a lot of sand and not much bonding agent, the kind of stuff that sucks damp straight into the house and allows cracks through which wind – and bugs – can travel unimpeded.

That weathered look

We chose a product from a Vicenza company, MGN, that specializes in plaster mixes to match historical properties. The plaster breathes but repels water, and has strong cohesion to keep everything from crumbling anew. All the old stucco was removed, we tried test patches to make sure we liked the look, chose a colour, compared quotes. We agreed that rather than going for a complete stucco look, the contractor would leave the stone face showing and mortar between them. We left the country.

The product is fantastic but it turns out Godzilla’s walls are not. There are a lot of smaller stones that are not structurally secure, and – it turns out – are really difficult to point. Also, the plaster is goopier than the usual kind and tends to be messier to apply as a result. When I flew over from Canada to check out the final result, Angelo’s blathering about the many challenges of the plaster should have been warning enough of what to expect.

Just what I had in mind for the house

You might be familiar with an Italian cake (also an ice cream) called Cassata. There are a lot of different versions of this treat, but essentially it’s creamy cake with little bits of candied fruit in it. That was the first thing I thought of when I looked at Godzilla. The whole house had a pale coating, like vernix on a newborn, out of which popped random stones. I dubbed it ‘effetto cassata‘ and, sadly, everyone could see exactly what I meant. Not quite the vision of honeyed stone I’d been dreaming of.

A certain similarity

Mercifully, time – and acid rain – heal all wounds. The vernix fell away over the course of the next year, leaving Godzilla with something resembling the classic stone walls we wanted. Imperfect, as is everything with Godzilla. But now strong, resilient and damp-free.

Wonky versus perfect

01 Thursday Dec 2011

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The next steps on Godzilla are to reinforce window and door lintels that are crumbling under the weight of ceiling beams. There are a few openings that obviously need fixing, but our contractor Angelo would like to reinforce every window and doorway in the house with steel so they don’t resettled and cause new fissures. Or even hairline cracks for that matter. Here we disagree.

This clearly needs help

Angelo takes pride in his work and imagines (with horror) that one day someone will come to our house, spy a crack in one of the walls, and ask who did the work. Whereupon Angelo’s reputation will be ruined. He’s also one of many Italian construction people who have suggested it would have been cheaper to raze Godzilla and start anew. This is probably true. But if we wanted a new house, we would have bought clear land instead of our lovely ruin filled with centuries of quirks and history.

So, how to tell which openings need fixing and which ones we can actually leave? It’s expensive to do this, so we only want to be paying for what’s structurally necessary.

And probably this one too

Angelo is a fretter and I love him for it, because it reassures me that whatever he does in our absence will be done to the best of his abilities. It’s the aesthetic I worry about. We like the cracks and skews that give Godzilla its character. Will we be able to convince Angelo that some of them can safely stay?