The Villa at the Edge of the Empire

by Farrell, Fiona

  For two days, we walk about the city. We hold our respective homes up to the light. Same? Different? Better? Or worse?

  Francesco is an expert in sacre rappresentazioni, those early forms of drama developed by the medieval and Renaissance church to convey the stories of the Bible to people unable to read them for themselves. He was born in L’Aquila, where his grandfather worked as an architect in an office in one of the buildings along the Corso. ‘Up there,’ he says, waving toward a second-floor window above the portici.

  Among his ancestors were people who lived in the region so long ago that the time of their arrival is unknown. This is an ancient place of human habitation, home to a pre-Roman succession of tribes who have left behind house sites and grave mounds and the weirdly inexplicable objects of the unrecorded past — notably a life-sized figure with fat hips and muscled legs wearing an enormous broad-brimmed hat. The warrior of Capestrano, symbol of the region.

  Other ancestors arrived more recently. There was an Austrian courtier who perhaps came to the city in 1570 as part of the entourage of Margaret of Austria, illegitimate daughter of the Habsburg Charles V and a powerful woman who became for a time governor of the city. There was a young and wilful Spaniard who came when the city was under fiercely repressive Spanish rule in the early sixteenth century. This is a frontier city with a swirling history of governance that is printed in the DNA of its inhabitants.

  I walk with Francesco up to the highest point where the Spaniards built their castle. The walls of the Forte Spagnolo are 14 metres thick at the base in a deep dry moat. The fort sits heavily on the peak, like a heavy fist expressing iron rule and imprisonment without hope. There is a park around it, with gravel paths and pine trees. Francesco tells me that traditionally this was an area avoided by Aquilani until the 1930s, when the city’s Fascist administration set to landscaping this corner of the city. They created the park and, in the valley below, a sports complex. Ski fields were opened in the mountains to attract tourists wishing to try the new elite sport. In a square adjoining the park the authorities erected a fine statue of two women bearing aloft a water vessel. Their bodies are lean and muscled, perfectly framing the mountains in the distance, emblems of the fit and healthy New Italy.

  In 2009, the castle housed the city’s museum and a concert hall, but in the quake those massive walls split and the building was closed. The park fell into disrepair when the city was so abruptly abandoned in April 2009, but a year later, the people returned to the squares and public spaces of the city, to clear rubble and mess. It was a gesture of protest at official inaction within the Zona Rossa, and triggered by a media report of a conversation recorded just after the earthquake between two Roman businessmen expressing their pleasure at the prospect of the profits to be made. ‘You don’t get an earthquake every day,’ said one. ‘I was laughing in my bed at 3.30 a.m.,’ said the other.

  On 1 February 2010, hundreds of Aquilani forced open the cordons around the Zona Rossa and entered the rubble-strewn Piazza Palazzo fronting the town hall which they had not been able to access for the past ten months. They hung the keys to their former homes on the cordons in protest. They bore signs. ‘Io non ridevo’ — I wasn’t laughing. And ‘Le macerie sono nostre’— It’s our rubble.

  A week later, alerted by Facebook and Twitter, an even larger crowd gathered: 6000 students and citizens, armed with a few wheelbarrows, buckets and shovels, began to clear the mess themselves, forming long bucket lines. ‘Il Popolo della Cariole’ the media dubbed them, the People of the Wheelbarrow.

  From then on, each week they returned to the centre to remove the mess from their streets and squares, and on Sunday evenings they gathered in the central Piazza Duomo to discuss ideas, for online contact is one thing, but the piazza, like the marae, cannot be bettered as the place for proper debate. And in doing so, the citizens of L’Aquila signalled with absolute clarity their intention and their right to be part of the planning process within their own city.

  It sounds familiar. Like the Student Volunteer Army that assembled, also via Facebook, to dig out liquefaction in Christchurch in the days following the September and then the February quakes. And the farmers who brought water when supplies in the city were contaminated. And all those groups that formed to help their neighbours or to query the machinations of the insurance industry and its role in the rebuilding of their homes.

  Up here around the Spanish fort, the Aquilani clipped and tidied and planted flowers, as guerrilla gardeners in Christchurch have greened the rubble with patches of marigolds and daisies.

  On this sunny morning the people of L’Aquila have fully reclaimed their park. They jog about the perimeter, sit on the benches to talk or watch their children kicking a soccer ball in a mini-pitch among the pines.

  Off to the left, at the edge of the trees, there is a strange building of wooden slats striped pink, blue and yellow. It looks like three cubes that have tumbled from a great height and come to rest, one tipped up onto one corner, the two others placed against it at odd angles. It looks in this city of old stone immensely frail, but to my eye also weirdly joyous, like a striped circus tent.

  It’s the work of Renzo Piano, the Italian architect who also created the Pompidou Centre in Paris, with its startling inside-out playfulness of ducts and pipes and technology fully exposed, and more recently, the even more amazing spike that has risen in London, the one that people have immediately named ‘The Shard’. The Shard is immense: seventy-two floors, 244 metres high, the tallest structure in Western Europe, a vertical city of commercial, hotel and residential space that punctures London’s skyline, like a sliver of clear glass among all that brown brick and concrete. It is one of Ken Livingstone’s bequests to the city, along with the free bikes.

  Here by the Forte Spagnolo, Piano worked in miniature, creating a little 238-seat auditorium for a city that had lost its concert venues. (The cube on end supplies the raked auditorium, the other cubes its ancillary services.) It was a gentle gift from another Italian city, Trento, which supplied the larch for its construction from the same forests that produced the fine timber for the violins of Cremona. It was designed to be as acoustically alive as one of those violins, a playful little Stradivarius of a building, set down on the hilltop, at least for now, for it is built on metal brackets and can be lifted up and transported as necessary. Ninety sapling larches surround it, to replace the trees that have supplied its timber.

  It looks odd and incongruous and it is not to Francesco’s taste, but I like it. Those striped cubes possess a kind of Harlequin exuberance that feels Italian, another expression of that spirit that covers the façades of great cathedrals in marble stripes and patchworks of green and pink and white.

  Maybe it is because I am a New Zealander and timber seems natural to me as a building material. This architectural inventiveness seems like the kind of thing disaster should call forth, like the Pallet Pavilion in Christchurch created by Gap Filler from stacks of builders’ wooden pallets destined otherwise for landfill. For a couple of summers it functioned as an open-topped café and performance venue. Piano’s auditorium is a more sophisticated creation, the work of architectural genius, but the wood and the striped effect of lathes remind me of home.

  PIANO WAS NOT THE ONLY architect to contribute to the cityscape following the quake. In June 2009, only a few weeks after the event, Shigeru Ban proposed a building to house the music conservatory and a 600-seat auditorium on a site occupied by a half-completed steel-frame building. Before the quake the city possessed a wide range of performance venues, ranging from intimate auditoria, like the one in the castle, to the full-blown red velvet and gilt splendour of the Teatro Municipale.

  Ban proposed building a structure using sandbags filled with clay for acoustic purposes, along with the cardboard tubes that have become his signature since Kobe, where he improvised temporary housing around local architectural traditions of building with lightweight timber and paper. In an Italian context, his plans were less at home and
provoked opposition, just as they did when the cathedral chapter proposed demolishing the remains of Christchurch’s cathedral and using the insurance money to meet the $5.9 million cost of building a temporary cathedral to Ban’s design. In Christchurch, the result was a High Court appeal that found in favour of the objectors and though Ban’s ‘cardboard cathedral’ has been built and is fully functional, the argument it aroused remains bitter.

  In L’Aquila, the government intervened, splitting Ban’s proposal in two. The conservatory on the half-built site was completed by the Italian Civil Protection Agency, which has much wider responsibilities than New Zealand’s Civil Defence. An abbreviated version of Ban’s auditorium, seating only 300, was constructed for €750,000 by the Japanese government on a neighbouring site.

  A square enclosing a circular auditorium, it has the same simple angularity as Christchurch’s cathedral. The signature cardboard tubes have been used here to create a colonnade around the perimeter, a nod to classical Roman buildings, just as the tubes in the cathedral ceiling nod to the Victorian Gothic arches of its predecessor. In neither case are the tubes load-bearing: they conceal the steel beams of conventional commercial design.

  I wasn’t able to look inside Ban’s auditorium for L’Aquila because it was closed for maintenance, but the exterior has the same temporary air as Christchurch’s cathedral. It is hard to be critical of a gift to a damaged city. Such buildings are the unadorned boxes of international aid, delivered to a desperate people. They are cultural or spiritual triage centres. L’Aquila’s two gifts serve a function, though Francesco and others are not completely convinced. They find them acoustically excellent and that, of course, is the primary purpose of a concert venue, but each is too small to accommodate the local audience for classical music. Far better, they think, to have directed money towards the restoration of one of the city’s larger permanent concert halls.

  I WALK WITH FRANCESCO THROUGH the narrow streets of his city, where a scattering of shops announce ‘APERTO!’, as shops and businesses in Christchurch have announced their continued presence with ‘OPEN! Yes We Are OPEN!’ and arrows pointing the way across cleared ground. ‘We Are Still HERE!’ The letters shout at passers-by like someone paddling desperately in deep water. In L’Aquila’s centre we pass a boutique selling women’s clothing, a solitary pastry shop with elaborately iced cakes, a café that used to be a perfumery but now serves multiple roles: café in the morning, pizzeria at midday, bar for the workers on the construction sites and for the city’s students in the evenings.

  We pass the city theatre, where the Teatro Stabile is advertising auditions and workshops for a production of Odysseus later in the summer. The performance will take place not in the theatre, with its fallen plaster, dusty velvet and damaged gilding, but in the courtyard of the Fontana delle 99 Cannelle, for earthquakes here, as at home, jolt people into improvisation and novelty. We pass the great basilica of San Bernardino, built to house the remains of a fierce Franciscan who won an immense following with fiery rhetoric blaming the ills of the world — plague and discord and the rest — on the machinations of the Jews and the sin of sodomy. He drew immense crowds in life, with his sweeping rhetoric and spectacular bonfires onto which the citizens tossed their vanities — paintings, cosmetics, books. In death, his remains continued to draw thousands. He became the patron saint of speechmaking. Today his sphere has expanded to encompass public relations and advertising.

  We stand outside his immense basilica at the top of the broad stairs built to accommodate the faithful. Today the building is shrouded in plastic, its façade supported by a dense web of scaffolding, as are all the major buildings in the city. These are the most elegant scaffolding pipes I have ever seen. They are not plain old steel grey but black or dark green, with brass joints that glint in the sun. The city’s Baroque buildings are creations of order and symmetry, their porticoes of exactly the right proportions, height to width, their window embrasures lined along a precise horizon. The scaffolding is another dimension of order, a kind of architectural sketching of narrow lines fanning out to fill the curve of an archway, reaching the full height across the façades of palaces and churches. It amplifies what lies beneath and I find it oddly beautiful, though I know that the scaffolding, too, has been the object of criticism.

  Scaffolding companies have been accused of creating over-elaborate systems, sopping up funds intended for rebuilding. An urban planner, Antonio Perrotti, complained publicly that contracts for demolition, rubble clearance and the excessive reinforcement of buildings had been subject to wheeling and dealing and handed out to favoured companies. This he labelled ‘corruption’. An EU report claimed that €494 million allocated from a solidarity fund to which various European governments had contributed to assist building emergency housing, had gone to companies linked with ‘organised crime’. Apartments had been built for 158 per cent above market value. Businessmen engaged in the restoration of two churches were arrested in June 2014, charged with bid-rigging and fraudulently influencing public officials. Officials in the city’s administration have come under investigation for falsifying accounts and receiving bribes from building and scaffolding companies. The deputy mayor was accused of taking kickbacks, and though he was acquitted, there is a swirl of mistrust in the process.

  In New Zealand, of course, we don’t countenance corruption. We shrug when we read about such things in Italy and nod wisely: Ah yes, organised crime. Of course. The Mafia. It’s Italy. What do you expect? In New Zealand we are above corruption. We are pure. When tenders are handed to contractors without competitive tendering or thorough scrutiny in the media, when we hear that contractors are skimping on materials, executing quick once-over repair jobs on quake-damaged homes, registering increased profit while people live on in leaking houses, we call it ‘jobs for the boys’. We call it ‘living in a country where it is good to do business’. The effect, however, if you live in that leaking home, is just the same.

  We pass doorways with signs for university departments now displaced to the perimeter. We walk through a city where only a handful of buildings have been cleared away completely. The hospital, council offices, that fragile student dormitory, industrial buildings around the city recently built of pre-cast and non-ductile concrete proved startlingly vulnerable to seismic shock. Concrete, Francesco says, is no more to be trusted than ancient masonry and he points to the walls of fifteenth-century churches and seventeenth-century palazzi to prove it.

  The city retains its ancient layout. Official signs read ‘L’Aquila Rinasce’, L’Aquila Reborn, on the oldest of old dungers. There is no talk here of replacing the past with something contemporary, something ‘world class’.

  We turn this way and that through an intricate map of narrow streets, breaking open at intervals into squares with fountains and palaces and churches, then back to the narrow alley. It is like moving through a living organism, with a rhythmic pulse of alternating open and closed.

  It’s confusing. I’m lost in seconds. Francesco says that I’m not alone in this. Maurits Escher knew this city and the region around it well and you can sense it in those drawings he made of surreal architecture where people walk up and down and round and round in an endless geometrical loop. The artist lived near L’Aquila until his son was required to wear a mini version of a Blackshirt uniform to school and vow to defend Il Duce with his blood, when the family decided to move north to calmer climes.

  We turn left and right, walk up and down, are pumped out into the glare of the Piazza Duomo, the area cleared by the People of the Wheelbarrow, reclaiming what was theirs. Not the property of the government. Not a zone controlled by the military. But theirs. The people of the city. When the authorities came up with a plan to excavate beneath the square during the rebuilding to create additional parking, the people objected so strenuously that the plan was shelved. This is their centre. They have a vigorous say in what happens here.

  Today, its silvery stones are empty, except for a few market
stalls selling T-shirts, CDs and cakes. It’s a tiny remnant of the market that covered the whole expanse on such days before the quake. The Duomo walls off one end, staring blank eyed over the square, having seen it all before. Its cracked Baroque façade dates to 1703, replacing the medieval original that collapsed when the plates made their last major adjustment. It was not completely rebuilt until the 1920s. But across the square another magnificent church, Santa Maria del Suffragio, is open. People pass in and out under a great web of scaffolding to an interior where the Virgin and Child in their gilded crowns glint in the light of candles and there are altars and pews before the whole is cut off abruptly by a plywood wall concealing the hole at its heart where the cupola collapsed. A metal frame like an opened umbrella rises over the broken roof, ready to support the new structure.

  THE BUILDING FRANCESCO MOST WANTS to show me is also dedicated to the Virgin but its chief association is with a gentle soul, a hermit who came to this remote mountainous area to live simply among trees and streams.

  The Basilica Santa Maria di Collemaggio is a short distance from the centre on a hillside where once the great flocks of the transhumance grazed on their way to and from mountain pastures. It is an extraordinary place, a vast rectangular hall fronted by a façade of the same red and white marble patchwork as the fountain with the ninety-nine spouts, only here the patchwork is even more elaborate, made up of four-sided crosses and on such a scale that the effect is hypnotic. Part of the façade is in fact a false front, standing clear of the roof like the frontages of Victorian commercial buildings back home, to permit the development of architectural ornament and to impress the viewer. It certainly succeeds. We stand at the centre of a huge grassy square to view it properly. Inside, there is damage and fallen stone and scaffolding holding the whole place steady, but the façade remains intact, interrupted by an arched central doorway flanked by two smaller ones. Above it is a circular window of that symmetrical tracery and stained glass that always reminds me not so much of roses as the amazing geometry of pompom dahlias. But it is not the façade Francesco wants me to see but a door on one side, the Porta Santa. This unassuming door forms the focus of L’Aquila’s most significant annual event, the celebration of the Perdonanza, the Pardon.