“The time stops when you step through this door,” Cassiano says when he was about to open the wooden door in front of us. He stuck the key in and turned it four times. The door shrieked as he pushed it inwards. I could see fleck of dust, shone by the sunlight, were flying out. I squinted my eyes as I stepped inside, trying to adjust them with the only transom lights coming in from the right-corner of the room and a small window on my right.
Read MoreThe incident that almost ended his life, was actually a turning point of his life and work. It made him re-evaluate his approach on architecture. During his hospitalization, he began to theorize about the structure of his body as a series of fractures that had to be put together again (by ArchDaily). The fractures would be later perceived as fragments, quoting his writing “the question of the fragment in architecture is very important since it may be that only ruins express a fact completely. I am thinking of a unity, or a system, made solely by reassembled fragments.”
Read More“Hugo per te.” A cocktail based on prosecco, elderflower syrup, sparkling water, and mint leaves mixed in a white wine glass was brought to the high table where I was sitting. Grey and quiet Monday morning. Never loved it. I’d thought that a bit of alcohol could have given me more spirit to start the day where I took a remote working day from the mountain. The bartender went back to clean his bar and arrange the bottles sorted in a way that I had thought by the size of the labels. I sipped my Hugo and let one of the smaller ice cube slipped into my mouth and crushed it between my teeth.
Read MoreWhat do we know about the Dark Ages? The period where everybody thinks of the massive warfare across Europe after the downfall of the Roman Empire by the barbarians, or the slaughters of the scholars due to their misinterpreted intelligence as witchcraft? Well, stop there. They are all myths. In fact, the downfall of the Roman Empire brings the economy to be a lot localized and the Roman kings were out of cash to pay hordes of armies. And the scholars developed new military technology and agricultural techniques and handcrafts. These transitions are the moments celebrated every year by Monteriggioni, embracing the rising of the Dark Ages which are not dark at all.
Read MoreLarius.
How it was used to be known.
A land which bore a man who wrote a lot of accounts on the Italian wars and battles in the 16th century. His eyewitness accounts were some of the few significant prominent sources in that period. Paolo Giovio. A chronicler he was.
Among of all his notes, one was about this land. It was firstly published in Venice, then went viral among the Romans. From there, the land became an important hub. It connected Italy and Northern Europe during the Roman Imperial period.
However later, the land’s name transformed.
Como Lake it is now.
Temperature dropped as low as minus 7 as the winter slowly crawled under the horizon and was showing no holding back. The ice formed the calm water from the shores, a thin layer spreading across the surface of Lago di Comabbio (Comabbio Lake), and then downward to nobody knows how deep. The superimposed ice had formed a thick layer from the rain, which had been fallen on the day before I came there, and had been seeped up through the cracks in the ice. The lake became frozen.
Read More
