Cleaning out, organizing, secreting away piles, boxes, bags, heaps, stacks, clumps, sheaves, sweepings in preparation for visitors, I think of you, Luciano Faggiano, going in search of the broken sewage pipe in the house you bought to make into a trattoria and uncovering to your fascination and dismay a virtually bottomless litter of cultures and civilizations. Beneath the floor, you found
a Franciscan chapel for the laying out of the dead
a dwelling of the Knights Templars complete with fresco
a Roman granary
a tomb of the Messapians, an Illyrian people from the time of the Trojan War
vases, devotional bottles, rings, hidden frescoes...
in short, the remnants of life on the site going back 2500 years. In the caves of the neighborhood, neolithic wall drawings; elsewhere in the town, baroque churches, German castles bringing the story up to the present day. You must not have been too surprised when the past came wafting up at you from the hole in the floor.
Once each culture you discovered was the proprietor of the place, making the decisions about what and where to build, and with what furnishings and useful or decorative objects to fill spaces. The people who lived in what you've found below must have been aware, if they thought of it, of themselves living in a busy world of people of similar appearance, beliefs and experiences. They knew themselves imbedded in special but familiar structures of authority and custom. Looking more widely around, they would have seen particular threats they hoped they had power to avert; looking at what they had in hand, dug up while making their own buildings, they would have been bemused...as you have been these last years.
Today, we are the ones walking around, ordering, forbidding, making, doing; the past cannot protect itself. Like the sleeping princess though, it can get us to kiss it awake. The floor that was lain over the abyss of time in order to put up the building you purchased was just a hedge of thorns awaiting someone doughty and obsessed, like you.
Our detritus has not such heritage but it is redolent of our lives. As we dig, the lightly sleeping objects we touch wake to yowling need for attention. I'd rather we were dealing with the stuff of a thousand years ago, used to sleeping, hard to rouse.
a Franciscan chapel for the laying out of the dead
a dwelling of the Knights Templars complete with fresco
a Roman granary
a tomb of the Messapians, an Illyrian people from the time of the Trojan War
vases, devotional bottles, rings, hidden frescoes...
in short, the remnants of life on the site going back 2500 years. In the caves of the neighborhood, neolithic wall drawings; elsewhere in the town, baroque churches, German castles bringing the story up to the present day. You must not have been too surprised when the past came wafting up at you from the hole in the floor.
Once each culture you discovered was the proprietor of the place, making the decisions about what and where to build, and with what furnishings and useful or decorative objects to fill spaces. The people who lived in what you've found below must have been aware, if they thought of it, of themselves living in a busy world of people of similar appearance, beliefs and experiences. They knew themselves imbedded in special but familiar structures of authority and custom. Looking more widely around, they would have seen particular threats they hoped they had power to avert; looking at what they had in hand, dug up while making their own buildings, they would have been bemused...as you have been these last years.
Today, we are the ones walking around, ordering, forbidding, making, doing; the past cannot protect itself. Like the sleeping princess though, it can get us to kiss it awake. The floor that was lain over the abyss of time in order to put up the building you purchased was just a hedge of thorns awaiting someone doughty and obsessed, like you.
Our detritus has not such heritage but it is redolent of our lives. As we dig, the lightly sleeping objects we touch wake to yowling need for attention. I'd rather we were dealing with the stuff of a thousand years ago, used to sleeping, hard to rouse.
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