Catch up time!

Alright folks, its story time!

So, leaving off from our one short, relaxing week in Scudellate, we journeyed into Ticino that weekend, seeing our site for the first time and finally getting a full introduction to our project. We journeyed into Locarno, a near by (relatively close, only four train/bus transfers...haha) city that boasts an active cultural scene fueled by the city's music festival and cinema festival that take place each summer. Before leaving, we were given two things - one was the floor plans for our site, which turn out to be quite minimal and very confusing, and the other was the general vision that this was to become some sort of cultural/art center. Arriving in Locarno, it was hard to know what to expect, so when we approached the site and saw the castello (castle), we got really excited and started snapping photos, following the crumbling wall under an nearby underpass and into a grand circular plaza. It turned out as we finally gathered from our photo splurge that what we'd just photographed, the main castello, the old wall, the underpass, and the big circular piazza, we not part of our site at all. Go figure.

Our site was, as a matter of fact, much more complex regardless of its smaller scale. The owners, two affluent intellectuals, brothers from Locarno, owned three buildings on the block next to the castle. To give you some perspective, the piece of the castle they owned is a small triangular, underground chunk that used to be an old battlement against invaders and used to be completely above ground before the city grew around it. So standing on the top of it to begin with was very misleading. From the top, you can see the courtyard below where the gabled building that they own (which at first seems to be one story) goes four stories down to meet the cobblestones of the courtyard. They also owned another building, fairly plain from the courtyard side, that actually has a decorative, curved, and historical street facade. The actual castle chunk, named Il Rivellino, was supposedly designed by Leonardo Da Vinci and was commissioned by the Duke of Milano back in the early 16th century. Access into the large stone walls that rise to a sharp point on the corner is from the courtyard below. Inside is a series of cave-like chambers, which appears a little bizarre when so surrounded by an eclectic mix of bland-looking buildings around, almost a secret urban grotto. Going inside was like stepping into another time and place, dark, gloomy, damp, and thrilling. After our brief site visit through the courtyard, the Rivellino, and the gabled building, called The Vernacular, we met with our clients again, but this time over risotto, to discuss what they envisioned. The brothers were very excited to have us working on this project, a dream they've had for some time now. Currently they'd been using the largest room in the Rivellino and three of the stories in the Vernacular as Gallery space for both local and famous artists (one of whom, Peter Greenway, a famous cinematographer, we would latter meet). So they wanted to expand the project they'd begun to include some sort of student studio and housing complex, preferably with the use of the existing built infrastructure. It turns out this program was actually geared towards supporting a group of architecture students, like use, to use the site as a home base to study abroad. The tables had turned, making use the end users - a very unique possibility indeed. Along with viewing the site, we got a brief overview of what issues Locarno faced, including social class divide and a cultural monopoly so to speak by the cinema festival.

After our visit, the brothers turned over the Vernacular building to use as a place to crash so that we could stay in Locarno for the night and get a taste of the culture firsthand. And, of course, as proper American college student, Locarno Culture meant finding cheap wine, and lots of it. Which we did. Quite successfully actually. Its amazing to think that for about 4 franci (about 3.75 ish dollars) we could buy a bottle of Italian wine that actually tasted good - even better than two-buck chuck (not hard to do I guess). The group of 23 of us split into a few fractions, two groups on a quest to find a good bar to watch the world cup match that was on, a group bent on finding a good meal, and then my group, three lone students stuck back at the Vernacular watch the bags. Good times. Soon though, we were relieved to go get dinner, which included of such exquisite fare as a cheap block of cheese, a loaf of bread, and bargain bologna. Yum (don't worry, i was getting quite used to it after our Italy trip). But at any rate, one of the groups soon returned to the vernacular and we joined forces and bottles of wine to find a good place on the lake (Locarno is along the bank of Lago Maggorie) to go skinny dipping. Wine in hand and gathered together, we set forth, leaving our valubles in the hands of a few more timid classmates. After an adventurous walk (aka semi-drunken stubble), we found a good spot and all hopped into the cool water sans clothes. It was great fun! Of course, returning to the vernacular wet as the buzz of the wine and cold water wore off wasn't as much fun and I soon was very much ready for bed. Getting back to the building, I managed to pull together my bag and a random drop cloth for a bed over the hard tile and fell asleep right away.

The next morning, I woke around four, to find myself sore from the tile, surrounded by people sleeping away - on mattresses none the less (where they found them was in the next room I found out later) - and urgently craving a way to get comfortable. After several positions and re-layering of the drop cloth, the most comfortable position I managed to find was sitting up against the wall. But by that point I was too sore and too awake to fall asleep again, so pulling myself up, I wandered about the town, managed to scrounge some breakfast up from a near by convenience store, and return to the Vernacular a little loosened up. We were asked to help set up for the Peter Greenway exhibit that was going on the following week, so the morning meant painting, lifting, moving, ect. After which we got another healthy dose of risotto and were sent off back to Scudellate.