The Best Day Ever

Today we went to a mosaic workshop and a leather workshop.

Today also turned out to be one of the best days I've ever had.

Mosaic is a craft/art that has been around since the Greeks and was popular in the Renaissance and Middle ages in Florence. In this case mosaic involves cutting stone and laying it down so that the pieces are flush with each other. I would call it more inlay, but whatever. The process and end result is absolutely amazing (I know I use this word alot, but this is one of the few times it's not an overstatement. I'm in kind of a "never cry wolf" situation with this post because I can't think of a better, more impressive word for this experience...so "amazing" it is). The majority of time is spent finding the perfect color within the blocks of stone for whatever piece you're trying to recreate. It's sort of like trying to re-create a picture using pieces torn from magazines. It takes relatively little time to tear the pieces out and glue them down, it's the search for the absolute perfect color match that is so time consuming. The smaller pieces in the shop (about 5 x 4 inches) were about 5,000 euros (which is even more in U.S.D.). Only 20 people in all of Florence know how to make this kind of mosaic today... it's a dying craft like so many other crafts. The workshops where you can go see artists practicing their craft are few and far between, but when you can stumble on someone making/restoring picture frames, or hammering at chandeliers, it's like stepping back into the Renaissance. The tools are the same (not just the design, but the actual tools may be ones that were made five hundred years ago) and the process is exactly the same.

The leather workshop was the same in that it consisted of a single man in his late forties. It didn't look like he had any apprentices or anyone to pass his craft on to. His grandfather opened the shop in 1921 and his father passed it on to him. This shop had been in his family for three generations and he seemed to be the last one. He made boxes made entire out of leather. The process involved twenty days of soaking, stretching, shaping and coaxing the leather into the shape of a box, or card holder or eyeglasses case. Each piece was hand made and each piece had a deep glow to it. The reds or browns or deep blacks seem to absorb and hold the light just under the surface of it's polished surface. Everything seemed to be alive. He had leather shavings in his hair, and used tools that had no equivalent name in English or Italian. These tools were his grandfathers, carried to Italy from the Netherlands along with the techniques for making these beautiful boxes.

We met Tanya (one of our frequent tour guides through AIFS) in San Lorenzo's piazza at 4.

San Lorenzo.

It occur ed to me that I hadn't taken any pictures of this church yet, and it's such a major landmark and so close to the school and house that it would be ridiculous not to.

Problem solved.
The Dante statue in San Lorenzo.

A table top. This took ten years to create in the workshop. Every piece is stone and all of it is naturally occurring stone.
I just want to touch this flower it looks so real. All stone.
Detail on the tulip. All of the color you see is naturally occurring in the piece of rock. This is the part of the mosaic process that takes the longest. The cutting, arranging and drawing are nothing compared to the amount of time these artists spend picking out the exact shade and gradation in the stone they want.
This is just a piece of rock. It's called a "landscape rock" because this type of rock naturally forms what looks like a landscape in its cross section. Nature is more amazing than anything man could dream up.
This is a more modern piece, the colors are gorgeous and the amount of work that went into this piece is equally impressive.

The "apprentice" (a thirty-forty year old guy) was working on this piece. The face on the left is the print out/reference picture and the face on the right is what he's created out of stone. Gorgeous.
The stone is cut with a piece of wire on a wooden frame. The wire is just a simple piece of wire... no teeth or any ability to cut on its own. Instead a mixture of water and abrasive is constantly poured on the backside by hand. The abrasive is the only thing that's cutting the stone and the wooden part of the saw is about two or three feet long so the sawing action is impressive.
Reminds me of Escher. All of the three dimensional qualities are with different pieces of stone. Simple but insanely difficult to do.
I liked this chair. So, I took a picture of it.

This was my favorite mosaic. It was based on a painting in France in the Louvre. The colors and shading was absolutely mind blowing. It looked like a painting and it was hard to wrap your brain around the fact that it was made of stone with absolutely no paint or touching up. Everything was just using pieces of stone selected for their color.
One of the two men who work in the shop sketching out a theme for a new piece.
This is a Greek mosaic made of glass. It was about and inch square or so. Infinitely tiny and mind boggling.
Cynthia bought one of the mosaics of grapes. It was beautiful, just don't even THINK about asking how much it was. This is a picture of Cynthia, her new purchase and the man who made it.
From the mosaic workshop we went for hot chocolate. Now these cups of heaven don't deserve to be put in the same category as that stuff we get from mixing powder and hot water together in the U.S. This was essentially a melted chocolate bar in a cup. It made the rest of the night feel like Christmas when you go to look at the lights on houses, cradling your cup of hot cocoa. The air was crisp and my glasses were fogging up from a combination of the steam from the chocolate and my breath. All of the shops looked extra special in the afterglow of creativity.