Having left Calce Viva with two tubs of aged and slacked plaster for my work as an abstract fresco painter, it was time for a bit of RnR. We’d heard of a public garden being developed by the Zizzi family in an abandoned quarry nearby. We’ve bought plants from the Zizzi nursery for years and have been very pleased with the quality of the plants and the knowledge shared with us there. The new garden is a gift to the community and a showcase for a wide variety of diverse plants.
When we got to the Giardino, we parked and stopped at the ticket office, and unsurprisingly, found we were the only visitors. One of the great pleasures of being in Puglia in the (very) off season is the scarcity of tourists. We were given a map of the large site, an explanation of the various planting areas, and an umbrella as rain threatened. We saw many very cool plants, some of which we easily recognized from our years here, and some—exotic species imported from afar—were new to us. Along the way we stopped to examine the walls of the old quarry.
Tufo had been mined at the site—a soft volcanic stone used for building for which it is cut into blocks. It is not as heavy, handsome or as difficult to work as limestone (from which the lime plaster is ground). Tufo is less expensive and easily adapted to a variety of projects. The denser limestone is now reserved for more demanding projects, and ones with larger budgets. Long ago, most buildings in the area were constructed from limestone and tufo was used sparingly.
Looking at the quarry walls, I was still thinking about the layers of information and of the thin coats of plaster I layer on my paintings. Here the soil strata are incredibly thin, a few centimeters deep. At our place in the Pacific Northwest, the rich forest humus soil extends down and down, far further than our shovels can reach. Here shovels are rarely used because stone is encountered very quickly, rendering the tool useless.
The first Sunday we were back here this time around happened to be the monthly edition of the so-called mercato antiquario, which of course we took in. I came away with an eight-euro illustration from an old book showing the levels of Purgatorio, as described by Dante. The print depicts Purgatory as if it were a cup around which are inscribed the many livelli to which sinners have descended. More layers, each labeled by the poet.
Fresco, the art of painting with pigmented plaster of 500 years ago, also had names for the layers laid down as the paintings took shape. My version proceeds without names, though I follow a rigamarole I’ve developed for layering the thin coats of plaster on the primed poplar plywood. Named or not, I put down several very thin coats, each pigmented, one after another. Drying must occur between each, which adds another variable- going back into an incompletely dry layer leaves signs that I find appealing. My work as a painter involves covering and uncovering traces I’ve left on the surface.
Marks, 2020-2021, 17″x42″, pigmented lime plaster on poplarSally, 2020-2021, 17″x86″, pigmented lime plaster on poplar
The cartoon, as it is called in English, or the sinopia, as it is termed in Italian, was the drawing put down by the fresco painter in the early stages of composition. It provided a schema for the figures he’d paint in subsequent layers. I don’t put figures in my paintings, and my sinopia is not intended to guide the later levels. But I am always intrigued to bring up to the final surface elements or fragments of earlier imbedded drawing.
For me, painting with plaster—as I was recently reminded by a close watcher of my work—is a kind of (inside/out) archaeology wherein I create, bury and then re-discover what I’ve already done. So, in a roundabout or maybe even direct way, my painting in Puglia responds to the layered presence of information here. I’m always looking intently when I paint but am rarely sure what I’ll find. Sometimes the paintings manage to reveal truths I’d neither sought nor knew to have existed; when that happens, I’m delighted. The wonder of surprise is Ne plus ultra.
Back in Puglia, and back at work in Studio33, I was getting very near to the bottom of the bucket of plaster from Calce Viva in nearby Fasano, my mainstay. I needed to replenish the studio supply, but last spring, when I visited, I found the sprawling place in disarray and nearly deserted. On that visit, the signora in the office told me she and her brother, having inherited the business from their father who founded it in the 1940s, were ready to retire and seeking a buyer.
I called the office a couple weeks ago and she answered. When I identified myself and told her I was looking for 25 kgs of their Marmino ExtraFine, she gave me her brother’s number saying he would know if any were ‘available’. I telephoned and was told he’d have an answer in a few days, if not the product itself. When I called again, he said he’d found what I wanted and to come by Friday morning.
We decided to make an excursion of the procurement trip- after picking up the plaster at Calce Viva, we’d visit a botanical garden being developed in an abandoned quarry nearby. When we arrived at Calce Viva, I drove to the back of the extensive property, past heaps of aging lime plaster, the enormous brick kilns, several outbuildings and two barking dogs. When I got to the laboratorio, where they used regularly to put up the aged lime plaster in buckets, there was nobody.
I called Elario again, half-owner of the business, and he said he was on his way…. In the meantime, and since the door to the laboratory was open, I did some exploring, inside and out, some snooping and picture-taking. The interior and exterior walls of the building and the walls nearby display ample evidence of color matches being tried out. Some were done years ago.
He arrived and showed me the bucket of Marmino ExtraFine he’d found. Not far from it I saw one labeled Marmino UltraFine. When I asked about it, Elario told me it was the most finely ground of the plaster slurries they produce and was quite wonderful. I bought that bucket as well and hefted the two into the back of the borrowed Fiat Panda. On the way to the giardino, I chuckled thinking about my layers of history with them, and the information they’ve shared with me.
When I first decided to use lime plaster as a painting medium in my Pugliese studio, I did research and discovered that Calce Viva was not only close by but specialized in producing plaster aged and slacked in the time-consuming 500-year-old traditional Italian way.
The young man who anchored the sales counter in those days told me I should start with their Medio (medium) plaster (which is called Marmino because it has marble dust mixed in for luminosity) and then use the Fine in thin layers over it. I bought both, along with their Primer, with which to first coat the poplar plywood I intended to use as a painting support. This combination served me, with some refills, for the first years of my self-apprenticeship. I’ve always bought bianco plaster, uncolored, and added pigments as I use it.
Then, on another visit to Calce Viva, I discovered their Marmino ExtraFine, very finely ground and smooth, which I used quite happily for final coats over the next decade. I had no idea they offered an even more finely ground plaster. Now I know, and it spreads like butter. As they perhaps go out of business, I am getting to the bottom of, or better said, the top of their product line.
All this is very Pugliese: the ‘truth’- always relative here, and perhaps with actual relatives even rarer, is portioned out slowly, a bit at a time. This endlessly extends relationships and the stories that flow across them like water in the desert environment. There is never a hurry, and no need to be definitive about much of anything. Since the truth is murky, if it even exists, why try and plumb its depths, which can barely be seen? Might as well lurk around the edges in conversation, enjoying the give and take, and the occasional epiphany.
I wasn’t told about their UltraFine plaster, not because it was being hidden from me intentionally, nor because it was felt to be beyond my capacity or desire. Since I didn’t ask for it, apparently, I was doing just fine using ExtraFine, which in fact was the case. Now that I have 55 lbs of UltraFine, which I will use a couple spoonfuls at a time in my pigment-plaster-water-linseed oil mixture- several years will pass before I stop experimenting with it.
Painting for me has always been about trial and error- trying out materials and approaches and modifying how I produce the art I make. It’s not that I have or ever have had a predetermined goal in mind. Since I’m headed nowhere exactly, I’m not looking for a specific technique or material to get me ‘there’. Rather, I do the mess around, as Ray Charles used to sing about. And it’s messing around that delivers the pleasures, the challenges and the solutions.
The painting journey transports me. Some days I feel even more blessed than other days- what I’m making just seems to make itself and, in the process, makes me very happy. Having top-notch (as our son Benjamin likes to say) materials can make the process even more delicious. But using less than ultra materials also has its own rewards, as made evident by the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s.
It was this time of year about a half a century ago when my partner and I first saw a little forested plot of land outside Seattle which soon became our home and wonderfully, still is. Every May we toast the fabulous good fortune it has brought us, but instead, I’m writing from Puglia. Usually, when the town is invaded by ever-increasing hordes of tourists, we’re not here. But this year our departure has been delayed by a bureaucratic snafu. The good news is that the weather is lovely, the days full of sun.
Closeness to the sea bequeaths our Pugliese place a marvelous clarity of light, even in winter. Painters worship light, and a decade ago this seemed a fine place to carry out my acts of devotion. I was reminded of all this on a recent Sunday as I left the house in the very early morning and made my way over to the studio. There’d been a concert in the piazza the evening before, but the streets were deserted, the revelers asleep in their rented beds. As I walked up the somnambulant Via Roma, I could see a car was parked in front of Studio 33.
Bright daylight enters the studio from the blue steel and glass wall on the street, its only way in. When I got the space, I found a numbered passo carrabile (tow-away zone) sign inside which I affixed outside. The signs are issued to assure in and out garage access. Before I converted the garage into a studio, there had been a rusting steel roll-up door at is opening, and the place could then have once served a tiny car. The sign number 34 dates from decades ago (they are now in the thousands).
I have no car, and it’s not housed in the studio and if it were, it couldn’t get out through the steel and glass door that has replaced the roll-up one. Everyone who lives on Via Roma knows all this, just as they know a great deal more about me and all their other neighbors.
The blue circle with the red slash through it now has no official meaning whatsoever. But as with so much Pugliese when working well, it expresses itself perfectly. My neighbors are constantly shifting their cars around, to claim one of the few parking spots on the street. The sign reminds them to leave ‘my’ space vacant during daylight hours in the half year I’m in residence. And they do.
On the early May morning, after my walk up Via Roma, I saw that the car parked in my space belonged to my kind neighbor next door. On every other day he rises early to make the hour drive to Bari where he runs a couple natural food shops. But this was Sunday, and he had every right to be sleeping in, far more than I had to expect the space to be empty, especially very first thing when usually I’m not there. Making myself skinny, I shimmied in between his car and the door, which I unlocked and entered.
Not long after, I heard his car as he backed it up the hill to a space that had become empty; someone else had arisen early and driven off. I opened the door and waved my appreciation and thanks. Reentering his house still in his pajamas, he smiled and said, “but of course Donald, you’re an artist and the light should be yours”. The exchange touched me. I knew his sleepy words meant what he thought and spoke a good deal to how art and artists are viewed here.
Almost nobody, including he, comes into Studio 33, and when they do, they’re nonplused by what I’m up to. But they honor my right to be doing it. Whatever it is I’m after, they know I’m serious about it, which seems to make it worthy of their respect. It’s not the no-parking sign that keeps the space in front of the studio free and clear, but the light protection that my neighbors grant me. Art as an idea gets respect in Puglia, even if there’s almost none in evidence.
Abdul, my tall dark and handsome Moroccan neighbor across via Roma, friend, and our sometime helper, leaves his old beat-up Audi in the space when he returns home for a siesta and can find nowhere else to put it. He knows I’m usually home taking my own nap then. But if I get back to the studio before he leaves, I know that he’ll soon be off again, showered, changed and spruced up, to visit a lady friend, I suspect. But if he sees me, he always apologizes for blocking the light.
Speaking of light, a small red LED now shines dimly in the corner of the studio where the circuit breakers are located. Mario put it in so that we could tell when the water level in the old cistern needed refilling. That was long after the Aquedotto Pugliese turned down my request to hook up to city water. One of the attractions of the garage/future studio space was that it came with a toilet and a sink, connected to water pipes and the city sewer.
In the abandoned space, the water had been shut off some years earlier. But following the water pipes I could see they headed upstairs to the apartment above, to which the garage once belonged. I rang the bell on the ground floor door and a signora poked her head out of an upstairs window. From down on the street, I asked if she would be willing to turn the water on once again to the space below, for which I would gladly pay my share. No, was all she said, and summarily shut the window. A most un-Pugliese response.
I contacted the Aquedotto Pugliese and having provided the address and other necessities, asked when they could hook me up. The first response was that it would cost 8000 euros, the second was that no, a connection wouldn’t be possible. Why would that be I inquired. Because the space is listed as a garage, and on Via Roma water can only be provided for human use. I countered there were pipes and a toilet and a sink in the space, so obviously there used to be water there. Not any longer possible she said, given with the same finality as the signora above. She wished me a good afternoon and hung up. That apparently was that.
Never mind that nowadays most of the water consumed on Via Roma is used by tourists renting the bnbs which come with Jacuzzis, soaking tubs, and other seemingly sexualized water features. The ground floor spaces, all once garages or depositi like mine, and all single rooms, are big on water use, if small on space.
For the next several years, I schlepped water jugs from the public fountain at the foot of Via Roma up to the studio. I used it to thin the lime plaster I paint with, clean brushes and spatulas, and to flush the toilet. The sink and toilet drain into the city sewer, apparently unaware I’m not supposed to be using water. This water carrying took place before my left elbow received a new Kevlar tendon; increasingly in those years, my painting arm didn’t much like the process at all.
One day my pal Enrico showed up at the studio just as I was bringing in a couple jugs of water and told me he was sure a large cistern lurked below the studio floor. He pointed to the pipes outside that descended the building façade and disappeared into my space. He explained that before the Aquedotto supplied water, people used whatever water was collected and/or stored on the roof.
More time passed. Then one morning I entered Studio 33 to find the seemingly precious water had flooded the entire space. It didn’t smell like sewer water, but didn’t smell or look good either. I mopped it all up, got the place dried out and then returned the next day to find the place flooded again. I called Franco, the taciturn plumber. He came and couldn’t figure out where the water had come from, but suggested it probably originated with a leak in one of the adjoining buildings, of which there are many. I went all around knocking on doors, but everyone assured me the water on the studio floor wasn’t theirs.
When I knocked on the door next to mine, the no-saying signora didn’t answer, but her friendly husband did. He said they too now had some standing water in the downstairs entryway and had no idea where it was coming from. He called the Aquedotto, and they sent out a guy with a stethoscope attached to an electronic device. He attentively listened to the street and sidewalk near the water meter and declared there to be no randomly running water. I asked my artist friend Alberto on the other side of my studio, and he said he couldn’t detect any water leak either. I knocked on lots of doors but never found out where the leak came from.
The flood didn’t return, but it had freaked me out. Since I store completed paintings in the studio, I didn’t want to risk their being soaked, either overnight or over the months we are away. I asked Massimo, our bravo muratorio, if he could pull up the existing floor tiles, and with Franco’s help we could check the state of whatever pipes were there, replace them, and put in a floor drain in the middle of the studio in case of another deluge. And I asked them both about putting in a pump where I presumed there was a cistern. Massimo did a bit of deconstructing and spelunking determined that Enrico had been quite right- there was a large open water storage space beneath the floor, with a vaulted stone ceiling, mirroring the one in the garage/studio above. Franco installed a small pump and ran a waterline from the cistern to the faucet and toilet, with an outside opening (covered with the orange cap visible in the picture above) through which water could be delivered.
With the ‘engineering’ complete, and the floor retiled, I called Mario who delivers water in his small tanker truck. It’s not for drinking but would serve me and my studio just fine. He came in the little truck, put in two tanker loads, charging me 40euro. No more hauling water from the fountain, and no more worries of the return of the flood- Franco had found and removed an old rusty water pipe under the floor that he assumed was the culprit.
One day the cistern ran dry. I called Mario, who used to be an electrician, and he put in a float switch and installed a LED light to give warning when it needed refilling. The whole deal worked terrifically. Meanwhile, I was flushing down the drain a couple liters of water every morning that the dehumidifier pulled out of the stone walls at night, as I’d been doing for some time. That is, until Patri asked me why I didn’t empty that water into the cistern? Duh.
Now I no longer call Mario, the recycling being more than enough to keep my sink and toilet in water. With a bit of work, the studio now generates its own water and light. The great pleasure of our tenure in Puglia has been trying to figure things out. It is an uncomplicated life, but that of course doesn’t mean there aren’t complications or lessons to be learned. Keeping the glass door unobstructed and the cistern full, provide light and water for me to grow paintings in the Studio 33 garden of delights.
Calce (lime plaster) is a living material, which ironically or not, is made from the exoskeletons of untold numbers of long dead sea creatures stuck in limestone from multi-millennia past. It brings to life the calcium carbonate in the tiny bones by grinding, roasting, and slacking (a very slow soak that takes years) until it resembles a paste that is no longer inert and breathes and soaks up the atmosphere around it.
I have been in love with how pigmented plaster delivers a mellow, yet intense colored surface for a very long time. I became fascinated by the relationship of color to plaster as it appeared on old walls on my first trip to Rome when I was 19. A few years later, living and working in Perugia, in the middle of Italy, I began experimenting with using plaster and powder pigments to make paintings.
A half-century later, finding myself living in an ancient Pugliese town made entirely from limestone, I realized I had to properly teach myself how to make paintings with the stuff. Since lime plaster is ground limestone, I was surrounded by the stone from morning to night.
Asking around, I learned about Calce Viva, about a 45 minute drive from our town. Calce Viva produces the highest quality of lime plaster using old world methods. We went there and the kind young man in the office took pity on my lack of knowledge and set me on a steady course of discovery. Over the past decade, I’ve returned many times.
Since the end of WWll, the workers at Calce Viva have been roasting it in brick wood-fired ovens, as it has been done traditionally in Italy for centuries.
However, even while the calce they’ve produced lives slathered on walls all over Italy, the company making it may soon no longer exist. When a person dies in Italy, it is said, non c’e piu’– and Calce Viva will be no more. Founded by a falegname– a woodworker, whose business generated too much scrap, he decided to try and find a way to use it. His son (the uncle of the brother and sister who are now retiring) went to school to learn how to make plaster in the old way, and with his father bought up adjoining properties so that they would have enough room to produce dimensioned lumber and have storage buildings for the limestone and the kilns and ponds for slacking.
Over the past few years, I’d noticed that the very large site was less and less busy, and this time, when I showed up to get my annual supply of ultra-fine marmarino, the signora (the only one in the office) told me that that there was nobody out in the ‘back lot’ because they were in fiere, on holiday…except that it was a very strange time for that.
I pressed my case: gesticulating, getting overly dramatic and sighing deeply, as I have long been known to do here in Southern Italy when necessary (i.e. when showing up at a museum ‘closed for restoration’ on Ischia, or at a historic tonarra in Favegnana in Sicily which was also closed for work even though none seemed to be happening). In this case I was passionately explaining that I’d borrowed a car, and driven 45 mins, to come get my yearly supply of their fabulous product (which was all true).
Reaching for the heavens, she also sighed and called her brother who, she said, was on his way. She bade me sit down in the office and cool my jets. Time slowed down considerably. Finally, tired of being cooped up while she entered numbers in her computer, I went outside to await his arrival and found him sitting in his parked car on the phone.
Together we drove the length of the large site to the supply building and located what I was looking for. During my time with him, he told me they are selling the business and said I should call back in a month or so to see what will be happening next…which I will surely do. If they completely close, I will need to find another source of my materia prima. In the meantime, I’ll try to stock up.
Apparently, the last generation at Calce Viva did too much slacking of their own. Their hand-produced, multi-step processed lime plaster cost considerably more than industrially produced plasters and yet was the perfect product for expensive historic remodels. Seemingly they failed to market themselves sufficiently to those who could/would/should use it. Plaster endures, but family businesses have a way eventually of ceasing to exist. In any case, my involvement with them taught me how to use lime plaster integrated with color and I am immensely grateful that I learned the process using an outstanding product. It is always easiest and best to learn using the finest materials available.
We were having breakfast of idli and omelets with the Prince and Princess, when Usha (the lovely Princess) asked if we were familiar with the Italian book The Conscience of Zeno. There was to be a book launch that evening celebrating its translation into Malayalam.
Knowing the translator, she’d been invited, and asked if the three of us wished to accompany her. Kocha, her terrific Prince, pulled a face, Patri remained silent, and I said that while I had read the book in both Italian and English, I wasn’t sure listening to a talk in Malayalam, which I don’t speak, would make much sense.
What followed was a typically fascinating discussion from our time with them at their wonderful country house outside Trissur, in Kerala. It turned out that the translator himself didn’t read Italian, but it also happens that I am much taken with Zeno’s Paradox, from which the book’s premis derives, and which suggests why going from English to Malayalam was near enough. I explained my Trieste-based knowledge of Italo Svevo, the (pseudo-named) author of the book in question, one of the very first ‘modern’ novels, where nothing happens, but does so bit by bit, championed by none other than James Joyce, who was Schmitz (Svevo)’s English teacher in Trieste, where he was writing Ulysses, set in Dublin where he wasn’t and to which he would not return.
Zeno’s Paradox, which he posited 2500 years ago, states that while we can get close to our destination, we can never quite reach it, since it always remains half the distance away, an amount we cannot, Zeno hypothesized, ever overtake. In Southern India today, as surely in the time of Zeno, nothing is quite fully approachable, nor are the veils surrounding everything able to be completely parted. We were staying with Kocha and Usha half-way through our recent three week return to Kochi, where we hadn’t been in a decade, but where we were to discover we’d never left. Lost in our attempts to move forward despite never quite getting there, we were having, and were to continue to have, a splendid time.
As far as I know, Zeno didn’t consider the role of memory in his paradox, but surely the inability to remember things could and likely would impede one’s progress (or regress) towards getting there again. In their novels, Joyce and Svevo both managed the disconnect between what was and what was remembered by messing with both past and present.
Being back in Kerala, which I thought I had much forgotten, I was struck by how much I remembered. And when we traveled to Kochi in the last leg of our trip, this was brought home (so to speak) by how many people rushed out in the street to hug me and welcome us back!
It was another breakfast with the royal couple, where the discussion centered on memory itself. Kocha, a medical doctor and 87, is very sharp. Usha was kidding him about how taking Brahmi had helped him stay that way. Having not heard of it, I asked about Brahmi and without fully explaining, he said that it was an extract of a plant that Ayurvedic medicine has long promoted as mind sharpening. He remarked, in his usual good humor, that he wasn’t sure if it had done anything for him, but since Usha claimed it had, he was going to keep taking it. He said, seemingly half-jokingly, that it could just be a placebo. I said that, placebo or not, I liked the idea of my mind being plant sharpened. We laughed about how it didn’t really matter if one thought one remembered more or if one did, and later that day I was presented with two bottles of the Brahmi caps.
Usha and Kocha’s openness, geniality and generosity were echoed throughout our Indian visit. After we left their sublime hospitality, we spent another week in the remarkable house built by our longtime friends Anoop and Dorrie. Tragically Anoop passed away a few years ago, much too young, and Dorrie, once the unequivocable doyenne of the Cochin café and contemporary art scene, is now constructing a new house and a new life far up in the Keralan ghats, the lush mountains that bequeathed black pepper to the world. She descended to sea level to open the house and welcome us.
Her Kochi house is down a narrow lane, which meant we arrived there on foot. After a couple days, we were greeted as neighbors, given open smiles and morning greetings as we walked the lane to the thoroughfare where we could catch a tuktuk. We’d spent our first week in the small river town of Aluva, staying in a large new villa loaned us by an acquaintance of our host, the noted Professor PJ Cherian. The grandiose house was sterile and empty, save beds and a few not very comfortable places to sit. It offered none of the grace, charm, history or personality of either Usha and Kocha’s handsome 1915 house or Dorrie’s more modern/traditional marvel. But it was loaned us with kindness and provided a quiet place to sleep.
Cherian’s own house, a short walk from the villa, where we spent many hours in discussion and animated argument, was human-scaled and welcoming. Built by him, it sits across from the Periyar River, which drains to the Pattanam archaeological site that Cherian directed for 15 years. He’d invited me to become the first artist in residence at PAMA, the research institute he runs. PAMA is Cherian’s effort to provide context and raise visibility for the cache of fragments he and his team unearthed from the Indo-Roman trade of 2000 years ago. Having spent almost half a century looking at trade around the globe, it seemed a fine offer. And it was.
Cherian is a brilliant historian and archaeologist, and I’ve worked with several of each over the years. But none were as obsessed, contentious and defensive about their discoveries. Zeno seemed to be with us wherever our conversation wandered, and wherever it took place. We never seemed to be viewing things from the same point of view, though our looking often closely overlapped. On my part, this was not unexpected, having had a stream of on-line messages and phone contact with him. I had hoped that our passion for examining the ancient trade would make up for our different agenda. And in fact, that was the case, though a couple times we almost got into fisticuffs. Nonetheless, fighting it out from our respective positions proved highly productive- sharpening the overarching argument about how best to present the findings to the world. I learned a good deal tussling with him and suspect he did as well.
Up in the open loggia on the second floor of his house, there hangs a large photograph of Cherian’s mother, an intelligent looking woman. That same portrait, just as large, adorns one of the two tiny rooms in the primitive ‘hut’ at the dig site itself. The other room of the hut features an even larger reproduction of a painting of the very dramatic bloody killing of Gandhi. The artwork takes up most of the wall space in the small room, and having gotten to know Cherian, we had little trouble surmising why it was there. Patri and I spent the night at the hut to get an idea of the Pattanam site itself. It wasn’t a restful night, since we ‘slept’ on narrow wooden planks, but lack of sleep was a fair price to pay for insight into the place.
The dig is now shut down, for reasons too complex and convoluted to recount here, and Cherian has plenty of reasons to be all riled up. But even closed and covered, from our visit in-situ we got a good sense of how it’d been carved out of dense aqueous mass. Pattanam was a fabled port when it was known as Muziris, until the Roman Empire collapsed, and ships stopped calling. Silted up, it vanquished forgotten for centuries. Nature took over, greening out the mud, since in the moist fecund South Indian climate, vegetation grows rapidly, reaching great height and density in very short time. In the scheme of things, it was not that long ago that villagers hacked their way to establish their small holdings. And after years of finding odd old bits they dug their gardens, Cherian and his team set out to systematically examine the soil. So far, they’ve worked only 10% of the site.
Large plastic bags full of discarded pieces of the terracotta fragments leaned against the outside walls of the hut. In the morning, I photographed some. Cherian had explained that with chemical analysis, the clay types can be identified, thus determining the locations where the amphorae were made. Most of the terracotta vessels came from Southern Italy, very close by to our Pugliese digs. The analysis also reports on what substances they held- vino, garam, as it was called in India (fish sauce made from fermented anchovies), and olive oil.
Nowadays, most of the world’s fish sauce is produced, consumed, and exported in SE Asia. But two millennia ago, it arrived from Italy, offered up in trade primarily for black pepper, which growing solely in the Kerala ghats, was viewed as a great luxury in Europe. Now piper nigrum has been transplanted and is harvested elsewhere.
When we left Kerala, we flew to Qatar and then on to Rome. We stayed in the capital for a couple days to catch up with friends and take in a vast and exhilarating Futurism exhibition. Because of the looming presence of ancient amphorae there, we decided to stay out at Testaccio. The neighborhood is named for Monte Testaccio, an enormous 2000-year-old garbage heap, masquerading as a large ‘artificial’ hill, built up from the pieces of an estimated 53 million amphorae. The same rubble we’d seen in bags at the hut, they are called testaein Latin, thus bequeathing their name to the (very cool) Roman neighborhood. Zeno followed us, we could see the hill from throughout the neighborhood but never getting close enough to touch it.
Presumably some of the terracotta amphorae pieces that make up the sizeable and now overgrown hill traveled round trip to India and back and were discarded there. However, most apparently contained olive oil, which though it was traded to India, the bulk of the olive oil that arrived in Rome was consumed in the city, and then for reasons not fully understood, once decanted, the amphorae that supplied the oil were thrown on the heap.
Throughout our whirlwind Kerala visit, there was a good deal not fully understood by us. Beyond the density of vegetative growth everywhere, there’s the ever-present need to negotiate the thicket of ritual, custom, history, caste, politics and the vast swarms of people everywhere. Seeing, and even approaching understanding takes time, and our visit was brief. Having previously lived and worked in Kerala, we mostly knew our way around geographically. But our hosts were all keen on helping us figure out where actually we were.
Kocha and Usha are both descended from the Cochin Royal family. The last Maharajah of the region, who died in 1964, was Kocha’s uncle. It was he who blessed Kocha’s desire to go to university, study science and become a doctor. Until Kosha had done so, none of the royal family attended university since it was believed they needn’t and shouldn’t work, going off for advanced study was deemed superfluous
As part of their effort to fill out our ‘fund of knowledge’ as myuncle used to say, they took us to the Hill Palace, hear Kochi on our last day with them. Kocha told us that when he was a boy he hung out in the palace with his cousins and ran around. Since there has been no acknowledged royal presence in Kerala since Independence, the palace is now called a museum and open to the public. Our visit there occurred on a Sunday, a day off for most, so the old stone building was mobbed with crowds of folks strolling through the building and grounds.
The palace/museum is sparsely furnished, but the walls are full up with framed and painted portraits, large and small. They show the royal family throughout their history, mostly in formal sittings, but also at leisure. Usha and Kocha pointed out their young selves in some photographs. The building is showing its age, but the rambling gardens leading up to it are beautifully kept, full of fabulously varied flora. Having had my fill of looking at the old pictures and reading the odd lines of explanatory text, I wandered out to admire the plantings. Soon I was joined by the other three, since the museum was closing for lunch time.
We headed off to a vegetarian banana leaf restaurant, where eating was a solemn serious enterprise, also spicy and very good. After our repast, we climbed back in the car and the driver took us to see their quite nifty pied a terre close by a storied Hindu temple. The low-slung brick building was built by Kocha and his two brothers, each of them occupying a matching wing. In the bedroom of their unit, hung a pair of portraits, one of the last Raj, suspended at a downward angle towards the bed.
The cantilevered portraits seemed speak to a problem I’d encountered at the palace/museum – there was little to occupy the large spaces except the many framed pictures on the wall – and all being flat up against it, they became a kind of wall treatment that for me steadily went out of focus. In distinct contrast, at the end of our visit, we took in another museum with Balagopal (Bala to his friends, who now very much include us), where the walls and every other space and surface of the three floors were greatly, even overly activated.
I was introduced to Bala, a trustee of the PAMA institute, by Cherian, who we were to meet at his home. The professor and I arrived separately, Cherian driving from Aluva, me by tuktuk from Dorrie’s. Bala and his wife Vini received me warmly in their spacious Ernakulum flat overlooking a waterway that had necessitated my crossing two bridges from Kochi. The three of us hit if off immediately.
Bala invited me and Patricia to join he and Vini at their apartment for dinner later in the week, and we all had a fine time. As the evening began, we were joined by Jacob, a young man who Bala explained ran a fascinating private museum very close to their apartment. Jacob told us that the museum had been begun by his late father, an antiques dealer, he invited us to come visit and then left the four of us to spend the evening in conversation. As Vini said later, it was if we were new very old friends.
A few days later Patri and I decided to take in Jacob’s museum. We’d spent the morning in Ernakulum, the more modern city across the water from historic Cochin, now known as Kochi. We took the ferry, which has itself been modernized- when we first in Cochin years ago, the very funky wooden topped ferry was painted a fabulous pink inside.
I’ve long been fascinated by the Ernakulum shops and emporiums selling everything imaginable within a bewildering labyrinth of streets (at one point we were standing at the nexus of Jew Street and Muslim Street, where we remembered there’s a 12th century synagogue buried inside a tropical fish store and stopped in for a visit).
Patri had an appointment with her colleague Rajan, who runs the heritage wing of the local government, and I continued to wander aimlessly. We met up for lunch at one of our old haunts, to revel again in their scrumptious fish curry, which time away had only made better. And though my favorite activity after such a lunch is a nap, I texted Bala that we were going to take in the museum. He answered that he’d join us.
Though the museum is in Ernakulum, its roots are in Cochin’s Jew Town, the once ancient hub of Jewish spice traders at the Mattancherry port where long after Muziris was abandoned and disappeared, but still long ago, black pepper made its way out the Arabian Sea, up to Alexandria, and over to Venezia. The warehouses where the bags of peppercorns were stored, called godowns, then and now, are extraordinarily capacious, very long and high ceilinged. They opened to Bazaar Road and exited to waiting ships through their back doors on the sea. Twenty years ago, I repurposed an abandoned Mattancherry godown as a working studio.
Jew Town is now well known as a center for antiques gathered from Kerala and throughout India. The enormous godowns are crammed to the roofs with architectural pieces salvaged from old wooden buildings being constantly torn down in the name of progress. When I had my godown, I often stopped on the way home to sight-see through the antiques places. I rarely bought anything, but became good friends with several of the proprietors, who seemingly enjoyed our banter and fielding my queries about the amazing stuff on offer.
Jacob’s grandfather and father operated a large Jew Town antique business. Apparently, they made a great deal of money, enough that Jacob’s father could squirrel away a huge cache of old pieces for his museum. He used some of the larger historic structural pieces from 25 traditional buildings and took 7 years to build an edifice in Ernakalum in the form of a traditional Kerala wooden house. He stuffed it with all manner of flotsam, jetsam, bric and brac. Now run by Jacob, it’s called a folklore museum but really is a glorious paean to an ancient way of life. Patri and I were dumbstruck as we toured it with Jacob. I forgot entirely about needing a nap.
Towards the end of our museum tour (and the end of our Indian idyl), having cast our eyes over ornate and commanding religious statues and small intricate icons, mandalas, jeweled headdresses, elaborate necklaces, entire winding staircases, gorgeous teak ceilings, solid hunks of carved and joined furniture, embroidered silk costumes, delicately carved heavy teak doors and even Muziris amphorae, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a double portrait painted in oil. Jacob told me it dated from the end of the 19th century. The museum label identified the couple as Tamil. He said he knew nothing more because his father had bought it from a dealer, who supplied the painting without information.
I got up right close to the painting, but Zeno had gotten there first and wedged his Paradox in between. Despite or somehow because the couple are naked, the painter managed to give them a sense of beguiling sangfroid that seems to a contemporary viewer is surprizing. I have no understanding of how and/or why such a portrait should exist. But it does, and it seemed the perfectly evocative note on which to end our fabulous visit to South India.
