First impressions of Pietrasanta
So, its Wednesday morning and I’ve finally had a chance to catch up on sleep and reflect on the last few days. Today is a festival – the patron saint of Pietrasanta – so the foundry is closed and this beautiful town is apparently full of stalls (I’ll be off out to explore after this post).
The journey down was ok but quite tiring. My brother was a star and came with me to share the driving. We had snow and freezing conditions, the salt spray from the roads made the windscreen filthy. I’d cunningly forgotten to put the antifreeze in my windscreen wash so we had to stop occasionally to clean the windscreen so we could see where we were going. But it was a stunning route through the alps and the Gottard Tunnel.
We arrived Sunday afternoon and Valentina very kindly met us at the Autostrada exit, to show us the route into town as it was the first day of Carnival and there were street parties and people in fancy dress all round Pieatrasanta. Amazing to arrive in a stunning medival city, and see people wandering around as furry animals, or children with hats almost twice their size.
After Valentina showed us round and we’d managed to empty the car, we wandered around the central square which had an exhibition of large marble sculptures which was coming down the next day, we had a drink at a bar on the square then an amazing 3 course meal at ‘il gato nero’ – i.e. starters, pasta, and main course, I looked longingly at the pears poached in wine, but just didn’t have any space for it.
The next morning I had fun driving my brother to Pisa and getting lost, but managed to make it back to meet Valentina at 11. After a brief chat to the guys dismounting the sculptures in the main square (I loved the fact that the main guy had a belt with buttons controlling a crane, which he still continued working as he caught up with Valentina) she took me to the foundry.
The Fonderia Artistica Mariani is amazing. Having visited a few dark and dusty foundries under railway arches in London with slightly ‘heath robinson’ techniques, I thought I had an idea of what a foundry was like. Mariani’s is housed in a 2 storey factory type building, with windows on both sides upstairs and high ceilings, which make the wax rooms on particular lovely light rooms in which to work. Everything is highly organised and tidy. It is full of works in various stages of completion, all neatly arranged either on shelves or the floor.
First we went upstairs to the wax rooms – in the first room I entered, large rubber moulds were open, and about 3 artigiani were painting on layers of wax – an first outerlayer of softer moddeling wax in red or black, followed by a thicker harder brown wax for strength. In the next room, the wax sculptures were out of the mould but now suspended in a framework of steel bars, and they were having runners and risers added, and in the third room, all the seams and imperfections were being removed. This third room is where I am starting work (but more of this later).
Downstairs we saw sculptures now encased in the ceramic shell, standing in lines like white ghosts waiting to go into the kiln for firing and melting out of the wax. Then in the next room I saw them doing a pour – the amazing colour of the bronze as it goes in. Nicola, the son of the owner who was taking us round, showed me the sheets they use to record all the details of each pour – including the weather and humidity. It all seems far more scientific as they continually strive to improve the technique. I’m wondering if I could do some work linked to their processes…
Then we saw the two rooms where they bronze pieces were worked – a room for small pieces where artigiani were grinding and polishing pieces, then an amazing room full of giant sculptures being put back together after having been cast in sections. The final area was for patination, where I saw a huge head which was a bright electric blue (copper sulphate I think) in an intermediary step of the colouration process.
As I’m out of time and space, I will tell you more later.
