Southern Trip: Vietri, Cuma, + Bacoli, Italia

11.12.2008
Vietri, Cuma, + Bacoli, Italia

Our first stop of the day was Vietri. It’s a tiny town, and our main reason for stopping was to visit the ceramics factory. It’s a very sustainable building, as it takes advantage of natural lighting, conserves energy by nestling into the hillside, and uses factory-created pots as insulation in the walls. We got a tour from an Italian who worked there, Cinzia translating as we went along. The building interior is organized along a big ramp that follows the perimeter, with a big light well in the center. The roof and floors are held up by tree-like columns that branch off and create dynamic spaces inside. We began on the top floor, where they had classrooms and created designs. The next floor down, we watched a man throw a vase on a wheel right in front of us in a matter of seconds. It made me miss my days of ceramics at Emma Willard! Once the vase was complete, he took it off the wheel, showed it to us, then cut it in half to show us the section. After a few seconds of oohs and ahhs, he let it fall and crumple and threw it into a pile of scrap! We walked around and saw shelves and shelves of pieces waiting to be fired. The next floor down, we watched workers glazing already fired pieces. All of them are painted by hand, and they churned out the same designs over and over, slightly different wiggles in all the lines. The rest of the time was ours to explore all of the pieces for sale, of which there were probably thousands. I’ve never seen so many stacks and stacks of plates, bowls, mugs, trays, and teapots. Kendall noted that they clearly had no concept of “supply and demand”-as beautiful as they all were, this was definitely true!
We soon trooped back on the bus and drove to Cuma. The area that we visited was far removed from the town, but was the ancient site of where sibyls would make predictions. It basically consisted of a long, tall, trapezoidal hallway with small rooms branching off, built into rocks. Some people sketched, but I couldn’t find anything that inspired me enough to do a full on drawing, so I amused myself for a while by taking pictures, then watching a family of pigeons nursing their young, of which I could only see tiny fluffy heads. I then made my way up an awfully proportion stramp (our word for stair/ramps), on which I couldn’t decide if each stramp needed 2 or 3 strides-super awkward. At the top, I found a handful of my classmates jumping off rocks and taking pictures of each other midair. I joined in the fun for a while, and we enjoyed the bit of a view towards the water, then made our way back down. I walked around for a while, watching pigeons and still being uninspired to sketch. Oh well. Bruce and I had fun contemplating how boring the life of a pigeon must be and watching them all fly around and land, fly around and land.
Once again back on the bus, and we got off in another tiny town (are we surprised?). We were awoken on the bus by Cinzia telling us “Hokay guys. We are heere.” We all asked, “Cinzia, where are we?” “We are heere!” We roll with the punches. Once again, we’d stopped in the town for one main attraction, the Piscina Mirabile, which is huge underground Roman cistern. It consisted of a huge hall with massive piers and arches supporting the ground above. There was some natural lighting from above, but overall it had very dim, dramatic lighting and was a bit eerie. We were given an hour to explore (which didn’t take long) and sketch. I did two: my first attempt at texture and shading of one of the layers on a crumbling pier. It didn’t turn out wonderfully, but I’ve deemed it a valiant effort after all of my typical line-only architectural drawings. The second turned out much better. I worked hard to set up an accurate perspective looking down one of the bays. The angles were crazy, as the space was tall and I was sitting on the floor. I also worked hard to draw evenly circular arches using many construction lines. I think it came out very well! I intended to try to shade it as well, but the caretaker had to close the space before I got that far. We got back on the bus and headed for our final destination, Napoli (or Naples, for all you Americans).

PICTURES: the ceramics factory, and the Piscina Mirabile