Hidden Tuscany

by John Keahey

  Spartaco takes me into his workshop, a large cluttered room also jammed with shelves full of small plaster models and floor space taken up with large models. If a buyer wants any particular piece that he or she saw on display, say in the Louvre, or a museum elsewhere, there usually is a model here that allows Spartaco to create an identical version.

  But in one corner, held slightly off the rough stone floor by a portable hydraulic lift, sits an unfinished white-marble torso of a headless, handless male, sculpted in a traditional classical motif. Spartaco said this is a commission for someone’s villa.

  This torso was carved out of a block of white marble that came from a quarry near Seravezza, an inland town a few miles south of Carrara. “This marble is more delicate than Carrara marble,” Spartaco said. The torso is fifty-one inches long and weighs 660 pounds. It is now finished except for hours and hours of hand polishing still to come. The marble block started out at 2,200 pounds before Spartaco “pulled” the figure out of the stone, a creative process that took him three months.

  Spartaco remembers visiting Carrara as a young child, when his great-grandfather, who created the family business, took him to witness the work there. As a young man, he studied at the art academy of Carrara.

  He had spent the free time of his youth in his forefathers’ Pietrasanta laboratorio. He showed me photographs of his father as a child watching teams of oxen pull giant blocks of marble on wheeled carts through the streets of Pietrasanta—a practice dating back to the times of the Romans and Greeks that persisted well into the twentieth century.

  All of Spartaco’s property seems too large for one person; after all, one hundred craftsmen labored here at the turn of the twentieth century. Then, it was one of the largest of dozens of studios within the historic city center. Now there are only two studios there. As Roberta had lamented to me, nearly all of the major operations have moved to the outskirts into various industrial areas along this west Tuscan coastline. A few others remain on the city’s fringes, but despite Pietrasanta denizens being extraordinarily proud of their city and its past, concerns over noise and dust caused by the many operations, particularly when carving giant statues, forced the studios’ relocation.

  This is also why Spartaco no longer does large statues.

  “The noise is too much, and we are too close,” he said of his studio only a few dozen feet from the city’s main piazza. “The culture of the worker, in [the historic center of] Pietrasanta, is finished.”

  * * *

  Locals still gather in the center for the nightly passeggiata. The Piazza del Duomo is where children meet each other as toddlers and grow up playing together, kicking soccer balls, and learning to ride bicycles. And now restaurants and bars surround it. Fifteen years ago, I was told by a couple of lifelong Pietrasantesi, there were three restaurants in the center; today there are at least thirty-five.

  Pietrasanta, of course, still clings with great pride to its artful history. Marble and bronze art, now created on the fringes, is trucked in and put on outdoor display. Large individual pieces are placed throughout the square where people can see them up close and touch them, and where children are sometimes allowed to climb and explore smooth, highly polished surfaces. This being Italy, no one worries when fully nude statues go up in this public space—something many places in the United States would forbid. And the children do not seem to notice.

  These displays are not static. Unless a major artist, such as Fernando Botero, is being featured, outdoor exhibitions are changed every few weeks. The much-beloved Botero got the square to himself for the entire month of July in 2012.

  A few displayed pieces by others are judged more harshly. When an exhibition goes up, an informal comitato d’opinione (committee of opinion) prowls the square, passing judgment on the quality of the art. The committee is made up of elderly pensionati—retirees—who then sit in their usual spots, such as the long stone bench in front of a bank or on the steps of the Duomo, and heatedly discuss the pros and cons of each piece.

  My friend Filippo Tofani, whose grandfather Gualtiero Coluccini claims membership on that informal committee of self-styled art critics, told me that occasionally, when a piece does not meet with the group’s approval, colorful balloons will mysteriously appear tied to the sculpture. When committee members and city officials agree that an exhibition is a disaster, it can be taken down as fast as it was put up. I did not see any balloons attached to art in the half-dozen or so exhibitions installed during my nearly six months there, but I don’t doubt that it happens.

  Filippo laughs when he tells me that the committee’s standard of excellence in statuary is the nineteenth-century statue at the east end of the Duomo square that was carved by local sculptor Vincenzo Santini (1807–1876)—a highly traditional work indeed. Santini is still viewed by Pietrasantesi—and certainly the committee members—as a hero. When he lost his leg in an accident in the 1840s and could no longer carve stone, he helped establish a school of marble in the city center, which one author believes “became a seedbed of an artisanal renaissance that is still growing today.”

  Gualtiero and I became good friends, often sitting together on the steps of the Duomo, but my Italian and his English were not enough for me to probe the depths of his artistic likes and dislikes.

  Meanwhile, Spartaco, at age sixty in 2012, still has a lot to do. As he demonstrates polishing his nearly complete commission piece, he muses: “I already am thinking about my next work. I am thinking about the size of the next block [of marble] I will need.”

  So, like Doris Pappenheim and Elizabeth Page Purcell, he will go on and on.

  * * *

  As will Gino Barsanti, aged eighty-two. While the two women may be the first in their families to make art, Gino has a four-generation tradition to maintain.

  His grandfather Martino, and then his father Amerigo, ran one of Pietrasanta’s statuary laboratori for many decades. Martino had operated a small studio at another location, but sold the property and moved it, in 1935, when Gino was seven, to its present site between the Church and Cloister of San Francesco and what was then the city’s hospital. After the move, Martino turned the property over to Amerigo; the grandfather died five years later, just as Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, was taking Italy into what exploded into World War II.

  “Initially, Grandfather had only a few major clients, who kept the laboratorio very busy,” Gino told me one late-spring day. It sold only statuary and marble pieces, such as altars and baptismal fonts, for Catholic churches located primarily in North, Central, and South America.

  The war was brought home to Tuscany after the Italian surrender in 1943, and especially in 1944 after the Americans and English landed at Sorrento, south of Naples, and then Anzio-Nettuno, south of Rome. The Allies started pushing the Germans up the peninsula. German troops, and Italian Fascists who remained loyal to Mussolini after Italy’s surrender, fought hard to stay there.

  “It was not possible for us to live in Pietrasanta during this,” said Gino, who turned sixteen during this period. The family’s villa, located just outside the gates to the large, bustling studio, was occupied at one time by top German brass, who had made Pietrasanta a base for troops. The family fled to the mountains, living in various places away from the coast. This area had become a natural pathway for the Americans to push the Germans northward and was the scene of vicious fighting, horrific casualties, and much destruction.

  It was through this part of western Tuscany, with Pietrasanta at its center, where Hitler had drawn the Gothic Line—the line at which the Germans would stop the Allies from entering the Po Valley farther north, at whatever the cost.

  “From Pietrasanta to Massa was no-man’s-land,” said Gino. No one could live there.

  But it did end. And in 1945 the family was back in Pietrasanta. Barsanti Statuario Laboratorio reopened.

  Jump ahead five years. Gino, now twenty-two, is studying business in college. He suffers a stroke, certainly unusual for his age, and
is forced to drop out. When he recovers, his father tells him he does not need to return to school; he can join the family business. And that is where he has worked, almost daily, for the last sixty-one years.

  Over time the family’s two or three major clients began to drop away, requiring less and less statuary work. Gino persuaded his father to let him go to Canada and the United States, where he said he visited nearly every state, from New England to the West Coast, drumming up new business. It was a highly successful trip, he said, and the new business—primarily the production of altars for North America’s Catholic churches—kept the laboratorio operating.

  But that specialty would not last forever by itself. Bronze casting was becoming popular, along with commercial needs for mosaic floors and wall hangings. Gino also jumped on the opportunity to rent out studio space in the vast Barsanti complex to independent artists drawn to Pietrasanta and its art culture.

  “Originally, the men in the studio worked exclusively for us. The client would tell us what they needed and provide either the designs or we would create them. Then, we would assign the work” to the employees, the artigiani.

  As independent stone carvers and artists working in bronze moved in, Barsanti’s artigiani then were available to help them make their art, if the artists accepted the help. Most do.

  The mosaic studio is an exception: its five craftsmen work for Barsanti. They either take a client’s design or create designs for a client, block those designs on heavy-duty paper, and lay out the scenes using tens of thousands of tiny pieces of colored stone—each one selected, trimmed, and placed by hand. They follow the shadings of a finished drawing showing how the mosaic should look, choosing just the right color of tiny stone for a spot on a saint’s beard or the blue of the Madonna’s cloak.

  The mosaics are all done in reverse, glued facedown to the paper outlines. For transport, usually to churches around the world because most portray religious scenes, the larger mosaics are cut into workable sections. When the pieces are all reassembled and permanently fixed to the surface, the paper is slowly peeled away, showing the full scene in proper perspective.

  * * *

  Gino maintains he is not retired. He works in a small studio next to his office creating various designs, either for himself or for clients. He handles business with his lifelong contacts and helps arrange transport of finished pieces for his forty-nine-year-old son Emanuele, who took over the business a few years ago and now runs the vast enterprise. Emanuele had started working for his father in the early 1990s, just like Gino and Gino’s father Amerigo had worked for theirs.

  When I met father and son on that late-spring day, Emanuele was preparing for a trip to the United States to oversee the installation of a large marble altar in a Catholic church in Jackson, Mississippi. The structure had been shipped to Orlando, Florida, a few days before my visit, and Emanuele and a colleague were going to Orlando to pick it up and haul it to Jackson.

  This kind of job is what the laboratorio has done since its start nearly eighty years ago, long before it began the bronze foundry or the mosaic studio. The Barsantis have no intention of ending the business any time soon.

  “My life is this,” said Gino, the octogenarian. “The only days of the week I don’t like are Saturday and Sunday, when I am not here.”

  The memories abound. At the bottom of the stairway up to his office sits a marble bust of his grandfather, Martino. On his desk in his private office sits a black-marble bust of his father, complete with eyeglasses. In another room next door, on shelves lining all the walls, are ranks of binders, showing photographs of every statue or marble piece the laboratorio has ever produced. The older binders survived the destruction of wartime Pietrasanta.

  The photos are organized by category: dozens of various treatments of, say, Madonna, Madonna with child, all the saints, Christ on the cross, the Last Supper, the apostles, politicians, Greek and Roman statuary, and on and on. Pore through the books and find the particular style of Madonna you want. Or come up with your own concept; Barsanti artigiani will make it.

  On one wall, on shelves and in cabinets, are rows and rows of small boxes containing thousands of glass negatives documenting the earliest years of statuary created by this four-generation family and their craftsmen.

  Gino and I return to his office. In a quiet moment I see the octogenarian gazing at the bust of his father. After a moment of silence, he draws a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and says: “Every night before I sleep I think of my father. We were together almost every day of my life; we worked together, talked together—every day. I miss him.”

  FOUR

  Versilia

  The lonely and grand scenery that surrounded us …

  —Edward John Trelawny

  Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858)

  I met a traveler from an antique land

  Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

  And on the pedestal these words appear—

  ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley

  “Ozymandias” (1818)

  I HAVE no doubt that the western Tuscan coastline at the old Versilian town of Viareggio once offered “lonely and grand scenery.” This is in a part of the area known as Versilia, named after the river that flows from marble-rich mountains and into the Ligurian Sea north of Forte dei Marmi. The river intersects a road laid out by Michelangelo in the mid-sixteenth century so he could have easier access to the marble quarries above Seravezza. And that town, along with Forte dei Marmi, Pietrasanta, Camaiore, Stazzema, and Massarosa, is one of the principal villages of this tiny enclave on Tuscany’s western edge.

  In Roman times, this area was called Fosse Papiriane, and it constituted a major swamp between Massa and Pisa—a distance of about twenty-eight miles.

  Great swaths remain of stone pines, also known as “umbrella” pines, which humans have cultivated for their pine nuts for at least six thousand years. These Tuscan pines are packed along the sea immediately to the south of Viareggio and along its hills to the east.

  The coast between Viareggio and Tuscany’s boundary with Liguria to the north, while no longer isolated and lonely, remains enticing—in its own modern way. There is an almost continuous fringe of seaside resorts along the narrow plain, ending just beyond the marble-exporting ports of Massa-Carrara. This translates into miles and miles of colorful beach umbrellas belonging to dozens of privately owned establishments that rent out plots of perhaps ten square feet to sun worshipers.

  These day spas, occasionally separated here and there by a public beach area, line the western edge of a coastal highway full of automobiles, semi-trailers, and blue regional buses—all following the route, more or less precisely, of ancient Roman roads that connected Western Europe to the Eternal City, located a bit more than two hundred miles south.

  Along the inland edge of coastline, just a mile or so from the Tuscan Sea, the coastal shelf transforms into the gradual slope of the Apuan Alps. This is a hilly, heavily forested area between the Serchio River Valley and the Ligurian Sea, some forty miles long and roughly twelve miles wide. The western slope rises to heights from 650 feet to 1,300 feet above sea level and is peppered with numerous villages, many with origins in medieval times.

  The line of mountain summits, at an average of 5,000 to 6,000 feet above sea level, hangs over and dominates these human
-occupied clusters of ancient stone structures. The peaks are composed of either limestone or exposed marble that travelers on the main north–south railway line far down along the coast often mistake for alpine snowfields.

  The Apuan Alps are the Italian peninsula’s oldest and highest of the various ranges that lead up to the spine of Italy, the central and much higher Apennines. And because the range is no farther than ten miles from the sea, Versilia experiences heavy rainfall. The predominance of naturally porous limestone in many of the peaks means ubiquitous springs of water randomly pop up along its slopes.

  In the spring and early summer, when rains can last days at a time, narrow mountain roads are often awash in runoff from these bubbling springs, destined to dry up by July and August. Locals often can be seen parked along the narrow mountain roadways, taking advantage of the short-lived free flow of pure water by filling up containers for later use.

  But most travelers do not think of limestone when they view these mountains. It’s the marble—the yellowish, white, and gray blocks of Massa and Seravezza and the more famous blazing whites of Carrara—that impress most newcomers.

  * * *

  On more than one occasion in Viareggio I sat in a bar amongst vast clusters of beach umbrellas that stretch along the sands, sipping my morning espresso while contemplating the spirit of English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and imagining I was near the spot of his most-unusual funeral.

  In midsummer of 1822, the somber event took place on a patch of then-isolated beach at Viareggio, a small town positioned at Versilia’s southern edge. His fish-gnawed body, with a folded copy of his late friend John Keats’s poems in an inside coat pocket, had washed up onto the shore following the sinking of his small boat, the Don Juan, ten days earlier. Shelley’s corpse was not removed from the spot, and it was there where he was ultimately cremated. Most of his ashes and his unburned heart were carried to Rome.