Color and Texture

During the past few days, the three of us have mostly rested here in our home base--the lovely, quiet, and picturesque village of Anghiari--where we have been strolling through the arches, up along the walkways, past ancient stone walls that show the marks of many incarnations--former windows and arched doorways now filled in with brick and stone--and past lovely, brightly colored terrace gardens, potted plants, and window boxes, up through a covered alleyway and into the center of the village--Piazza Mameli and Piazza Baldacci--with their array of bakeries and grocery shops, historic churches, and civic buildings, restaurants, and--particularly in the main Piazza Baldacci--coffee bars, pizzerias, and the ever-popular Gelateria. Anghiari is a village of many colors and textures, as you can see from a few photos I took on Sunday evening:

Then last night, we invited the Quickes up for dinner, and Ann cooked up a sumptuous and memorable feast for us all, starting with crostini with mushroom spread topped with bits of smoked salmon, then on to a delicious lentil soup garnished with shredded radicchio (a detail she had learned from a restaurant in Padova), followed by a main course of grilled potatoes, onions, garlic, olives, capers, and eggs, and a side of sauteed green beans and mushrooms (the potatoes and beans courtesy of Juliet Q.). A splendid time was had by all, topped off with gelato soaked in a delicious liqueur we had picked up in the hillside village of Arqua Petrarca on the way down here from Verona.

Today, we resumed our touring with a relatively short drive down to a town in Umbria, somewhat oddly called Citta di Castello, which is neither a city of any size, nor does it have a castle. Once inside the walls, we found it a charming enough town, though nothing special, but our main purpose in visiting here was to go to the Palazzo Albizzini, now a museum dedicated to the work of one of the town's most famous citizens, the modern abstract artist Alberto Burri (1915-1995) . (This was quite a change of pace for us from our total absorption, hitherto, in the sacred iconographic paintings and frescoes of the 12th through 15th Centuries.)

Burri, who began painting while he was a POW (captured by the Allies in Tunisia during World War II), was an abstract artist who turned his attention to the interface between color and texture as such, and between painting, collage, and sculpture. His favorite colors by far were red, black, and white (or transparent), and as his career progressed, he explored the possibilities of monumental works with a range of textures, starting with burlap (sacco), iron, burnt wood, textiles, and plastic--red, black, clear, wrinkled, smooth, and often scorched with a blowtorch. The colors, topographies, and textures themselves became his focus of interest--including an array of huge works (mostly in all black or all white) that looked like mudcracks on a dry lakebed. These works had to be seen in the original, since photos of them do not do justice to the experience of walking up close to them and getting absorbed in the interplay of color and texture, and the slightly disturbing implications of scorched and twisted plastic surfaces.

Here is the website for this museum.

When we emerged from this remarkable exhibit, our eyes were opened in a whole new way to the rich interplay of color and texture that can be seen in the narrow streets, the pastel facades, and sunny piazzas of these ancient and glorious Italian towns.