Hidden Tuscany

by John Keahey

  The process was a magnificent example of precise, beautifully choreographed workmanship; the four acted as one organism. Everyone knew what to do and when to do it—no words spoken, just impeccable timing developed during years of working together.

  When the model is removed from deep in its sand box and cooled, craftsmen break the shell, and the sculpture emerges. It goes into the hands of the “chaser,” who grinds away rough edges and cleans the piece to prepare it for coloring, or the application of its patina. For large bronze sculptures, individual pieces might be cast separately. The Botero piece I saw cast is only one small part of the whole. Once all the parts are done, craftsmen assemble and weld it together. To the eye, the finished piece looks smooth, complete, whole, with no lines showing where parts were joined.

  * * *

  You see these craftsmen, around the lunch hour, sitting with a friend or two, munching a panino of crusty bread jammed with salami and cheese, and supplementing the meal with a beer or a glass or two of wine, delivered in quarter-liter glass containers.

  In one local workers’ club on the south edge of Pietrasanta’s historic center—CRO Porta a Lucca (CRO stands for Circolo Ricreativo Operai, literally “recreation club for workers”)—artigiani drop by in the early morning before work for quick shots of espresso, sometimes fortified with a rich Italian liquor such as grappa, and cornetti, soft rolls that resemble a French croissant. Around lunchtime, this particular club serves a hearty three-course Italian meal, usually of soup or pasta as a primo and a substantial meat or fish dish, with vegetable, as a secondo. If the customer wants, a salad is included, plus caffè at the end. The price is remarkably low for Pietrasanta—ten euros—especially considering it includes a quarter liter of house wine or perhaps a beer, soft drink, or bottle of mineral water.

  This particular club, located several hundred feet from one of Pietrasanta’s largest sculpture centers where dozens of members are employed, costs eight euros a year to belong, if the member is retired, and ten euros if still working. It is where many also go on their days off and on Saturdays. They all know one another, having grown up in the same neighborhood and worked together at the highly creative and mostly anonymous craft of carving and polishing stone for well-known sculptors.

  The most regular visitors—some seem implanted there for several hours out of each day—are pensionati, long retired from the various sculpture and bronze-foundry operations around the city. They engage in lively conversation with their lifelong friends and play hand after hand of cards in games that usually erupt into loud arguments that the uninitiated visitor might think could lead to violence. But those arguments never do.

  “It is like to be in a family here,” said the club’s thirty-nine-year-old owner, Daniele Maretti, who in 2012 had owned the business for five years. His sister Manola works with him, along with other friends and family members.

  The club first opened in 1945 as a Communist club—the second to open in Italy immediately after the war, at a time when the Fascists who survived were quickly switching their politics from the right to the left. Many clubs that began life under the influence of the far left still exist today. Driving through villages, a traveler can spot various buildings with the word circolo (club) in the name. On the Tuscan coast, it could be a club for fishermen; inland, it might be a club for the contadini, or farmers; elsewhere, it could be a club for teenagers or young adults.

  Originally, the clubs were designed to help their clientele get jobs. The workers, all good Communist party members at the time, used it as a kind of patronage system that was prevalent at all levels in postwar Italy. Nearly two decades ago, the system changed. The state took over the job of helping people find jobs—ostensibly to level out the system for Italians of all political persuasions.

  Daniele characterizes his members as perhaps “left-leaning, but not extreme.” He guesses there are probably few Communists on his two-hundred-strong membership list. That list also includes perhaps fifty women—something some other circoli might still not allow.

  “When I came here, no women ever came inside. I changed that,” he said proudly. “Now we have women teachers, office workers come here daily, especially for lunch.” And many women artigiane, of course. While it exists to provide a low-cost setting for friends and acquaintances of all ages to socialize, the club is particularly important to those pensioners, giving them a friendly, inexpensive place to go to while away their days.

  A visitor schooled in only the basics of the Italian language will not always recognize much of what is being said in CRO Porta a Lucca, particularly among the pensionati. These men and women speak in the dialect of their neighborhood—an emotional form of speech removed from the precise Tuscan speech that became Italy’s national language after unification 150 years ago. These members can speak pure Italian, of course. Everyone learns that in school. But here, among lifelong friends, their unique, rapid-fire words bounce loudly off the unadorned walls and low ceiling.

  Such clubs, while serving caffè and drinks, do not qualify as a typical Italian bar that serves anyone who walks through the doors. National laws forbid “bar” or drinks signs for such private clubs—except a small one placed in an out-of-the-way corner of a window.

  This name of “CRO Porta a Lucca” is in black letters mounted flat on the mustard-colored outside wall, high above two awnings and plastic chairs lined up for smokers. A small box of artificial flowers sits among the chairs, along with two tall ashtrays. The windows have curtains, just like a home would. From the street, an unknowing passerby would have no idea there is a club inside—unless he hears the loud voices of the card players erupt from the front door or sees a few of the members standing outside with cigarettes, or perhaps glasses of wine in their hands, and engaged in intense discussions about the weather, European soccer, the faltering European economy, or how tough it is to live solely on a government pension after decades of hard work. I overheard one man mention that he and his wife live on nine hundred euros a month, roughly twelve hundred dollars.

  When members arrive, “it is like somebody coming into your house,” the ever-effervescent owner Daniele said. He will serve the occasional tourist who might stumble into the place, but if they come in more than twice, he will let them know that the club is private. For me, Daniele knew from my first visit that I would be working for several months in Pietrasanta. That makes me an operai, a distinction that, along with my ten-euro fee, allowed me entry. We have become friends. I eat lunch there every day when I am in town, and it is where I have my morning caffè and cornetto.

  * * *

  There are one hundred sculptors working in Pietrasanta at any given time. Some live there year-round, others come in year after year for two- or three-month stretches. I met three who share studio space with friends but who generally prefer to work alone, without any help from artigiani.

  “I did that once: had someone do some polishing for me,” said Doris Pappenheim, a Dutch sculptor from Edam, Holland. “It was not the way I wanted it. I won’t do it again. People who don’t sculpt don’t see it. You get a special eye; you touch it by hand. That’s how we make our work.”

  She rents a studio on the edge of Pietrasanta’s historic center, near Daniele’s CRO Porta a Lucca. This studio is in a cluster of smaller studios next to a larger firm known simply as SEM. Just east of Doris’s is the studio of young American sculptor Richard C. Janes, who has lived in Pietrasanta for four years. He is carving, without assistants but with the help of an older mentor, two bigger-than-life statues of American soldiers for a war memorial outside of Chicago. Still emerging, slowly, from the stone, these figures are imposing, and they exude strong authority.

  Through a gate next door is a long three-sided structure, the fourth side open to the fresh Tuscan air. At the far end, her clothes, face, and hands powdered white, is Elizabeth Page Purcell, a New Yorker who prefers the appellation of “stone carver” rather than sculptor because she works only with stone, principally marble. Th
ere are others of course, men and women working in this large industrial complex rattling with the overlapping sounds of many pneumatic hammers. Scattered around larger structures housing computerized stone-cutting machinery are tin-roofed workstations for rent-paying artists doing their own work and for SEM’s artigiani, who are carving and polishing stone for others. They represent the tight community of artists and artisans in Pietrasanta who work long hours, five or six days a week, and who gather daily at CRO for its simple, inexpensive, but nourishing lunches.

  I had first spotted Doris from across the room when she entered with a friend. Her hair was covered tightly in a light yellow turban, and her clothes were mottled with marble dust. A smudge of white powder covered the right side of her nose. I approached her the next day in the nearby shop I frequented to purchase fresh bread and salami and cheese for my own homemade panino. She confirmed that, yes, she was a sculptor, and agreed to talk to me about why she comes to Pietrasanta to work. We met the next day for a brief lunch at Bar Michelangelo, on the ground floor of one of two medieval buildings in Pietrasanta, in which Michelangelo in 1518 reputedly signed a contract for marble.

  “I have a small studio in Holland,” she said, “but my social life there is too busy. It is hard to concentrate. I need to have a whole day, no appointments.”

  She has been making art for fourteen years. Now sixty-four, she started learning to be a sculptor while working as a social worker. She retired with a pension at fifty-nine and started working in marble full time.

  “A sculptor in Holland told me that if I really wanted to learn I had to go to Pietrasanta. So I did.” Here, another sculptor taught Doris how to use a martello, that hand-held pneumatic hammer. “It has a very special way of working. You have to master the vibration. For me, [using the martello] is kind of like drawing. I never make a model; I just start.” She might make colored-pencil marks on the stone, but no paper drawings.

  And what she sets out to create can suddenly shift. A piece of a project once broke off because of an undetected flaw in the stone. “Did you get rid of that stone and start over?” I asked.

  She seemed startled by the question. “Of course not. I just shifted and started something new. That happens.”

  It occurred to me that the same happens in other forms of creating. A writer who runs up against a roadblock in trying to tell a story will bang against the idea for a while, and when it cannot be resolved, must figure out a new approach, for the story itself or for the troubling paragraph, seldom abandoning the entire story idea.

  Her work can best be described, simply, as taking on shapes she perceives from nature. “I see it, and I just do it. It is natural.”

  This modernistic, existential style of sculpture differs from what she used to do: female torsos. But those torsos, despite selling easily, became too easy, not challenging enough. “I don’t like to do it anymore. I just want to go on and on. Many people just repeat the pieces they do; I don’t like that. I need always to do something new.”

  In her four or five months a year in Pietrasanta, she might complete seven or eight pieces. She calls in professional box makers to take measurements, and a few days later they return with wooden boxes that fit each piece perfectly. She has them trucked to her art dealer in Holland.

  It is interesting to note that while Doris has been to Carrara, a few miles to the north, and has seen the quarries famous for their remarkable, pure-white marble, she does not get her marble from there.

  “I don’t make pieces that big, unless I have a commission. The white marble [of Carrara] works easier than colored marble, but I prefer the colored. I love the yellow marble from Siena, the pink marble from Portugal, the travertine from Iran.” She usually selects stone from a dealer on the outskirts of Pietrasanta, who sells stone shipped in from all over the world, and has it trucked to her tiny studio, which she rents in a bigger studio space owned by another sculptor.

  Does she make a living from her art?

  “Of course not!” she says with a laugh. “Not many sculptors I know can survive on their art alone. People have to give lessons, or have a house to rent out, or studio space to rent out to another artist. For me, I have my pension, I rent out my house in Holland when I am here, and I have a small family inheritance. It is enough. I will do this forever.”

  * * *

  American stone carver Elisabeth Page Purcell spends up to three months a year in Pietrasanta and has been doing so for fifteen years. She has a “day job,” at the Art Students League on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan, where she manages the cafeteria for nine months of the year. She has been able to negotiate a brief yearly sabbatical, combined with vacation time, to return to Pietrasanta year after year. She has no intention of stopping these annual trips, saying she will return each summer as long as she is able. We talked during the summer of 2012. She has no plans for retirement from the art school, but when she does, her wish is to spend at least six months a year in the Città d’Arte. With a smile, she declines to disclose her age, but she appears much younger than I have deduced, through conversation, that she is.

  Like Doris Pappenheim, who is a close friend, Elisabeth says she was told, word of mouth, “‘You need to go to Pietrasanta if you want to be a sculptor.’ I came finally by myself and stayed a month at a carving school and fell in love with working outside.”

  Elisabeth maintains that she has always been a sculptor “in my heart. I was a dressmaker” before becoming a stone carver, “so I always worked three-dimensionally. The transition, for me, was natural.”

  Her rented space, in that cluster of studios at SEM, near the private bar CRO, is just off Vicole Porta a Lucca. She has two walls and a tin roof. The front is open to the Tuscan environment, and the studio’s owner works a few feet away, in his own space. He does finishing work on architectural marble.

  Elisabeth is a master at keeping her expenses low: she has a room in a home of friends who let her live with them year after year. The owner of her studio lets her store her bicycle and other possessions there; he knows she will be back the following year. And she has developed business relationships with marble suppliers, the box maker who packages up her creations for shipping them home, and the transportation company that gets those marbles from Pietrasanta to New York City.

  “It’s a tight budget,” she says, “but it’s who I am, it’s what I do, and I’ll do it forever.”

  A visitor approaching Elisabeth’s outdoor studio first hears the whine of the martello and spots the clouds of marble dust it throws up into the air. Then the visitor spots a dust-covered Elisabeth, her hair wrapped in a colorful scarf, her eyes protected with safety glasses, a mask covering her mouth and nose.

  She is grinding and polishing a chest-size block of black marble that she has shaped into curves and valleys. It’s a modern piece, and it shows her versatility when compared with photographs of her work on display in her studio in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and in her home in lower Manhattan. These pieces show diversity in form and color of stone: from literal female forms to figurative representations. This is lovely, gentle art that on one hand can be explicitly realistic and on the other can leave much to the imagination.

  * * *

  Across Pietrasanta, a different sculptor’s story emerges. A few dozen feet from the city center sits a large, two-story building decorated across the front of the first story with marble busts of Italian greats, including Michelangelo, Donatello, and Brunelleschi. This is home to the studio of Spartaco Palla, a fourth-generation sculptor of Pietrasantese descent who typically works with only one longtime assistant in this vast storehouse of statues and busts. Mixed in are a few pieces of his bronze art, but nearly everything is marble. There are busts, full-blown statues of ancient heroes, angels, women in Greek and Roman robes, religious figures, beautifully executed images of animals, and gods and goddesses.

  Ironically, this building stands perhaps fifty feet from the rear of a building with a sign that proudly proclaims the Florentine sculpt
or Michelangelo was there in 1518 to sign still another contract for marble from quarries high above the town.

  There are several display rooms in Spartaco’s building, a structure that has been handed down through the generations. In a large storage area at the rear, there are even more examples of his work, along with hundreds of plaster models created to guide the Palla stone carvers who worked here over the various generations. Some statues, I assume, were done decades, perhaps a century, ago and, for some reason or other, never sold. There are hundreds of pieces on display, and except for the models, all are for sale.

  My favorite piece here is a carving out of dark green, almost black, marble from Prato in northern Italy of a crouched leopard, un gattopardo, which literally translates to “dark-skinned cat.” Its shoulder blades protrude from a smooth, highly polished back showing spots of lighter green strands that represent the leopard’s spots. Its feet imply the creature’s intent to leap off its rough, dark greenish-gray stone and capture an unsuspecting meal. I asked Spartaco what I then discovered to be a silly question: If the sculpture came out of a single piece of marble, how come the leopard is so shiny and the rock is dark gray?

  “I polished it,” he said simply, meaning that he spent several days hand-rubbing the cat’s figure with special polishing paper. He was speaking through his daughter Lara, who generously interpreted for me. His wife, Rosanna Mazzanti, runs the retail end of the business and also speaks some English. She helped out with some of the words.

  The shaping with hammer and chisel, and later with a martello, had only been part of the process. Polishing involves using various degrees of paper abrasives and always is done by hand. Spartaco said that some clients want finished works to reflect various degrees of polishing: from rough hammer-and-chisel finish to shiningly smooth. When those steps are completed, he then rubs in coats of wax to achieve the kind of patina he and his clients want.