CONSTRUCTION IN SICILY
We have watched several buildings being constructed in our time here. It is fascinating to see how much they differ from how things are built in the states. As mentioned before, some homes are worked on intermittently by families when they have the time and money (first picture) and some are part of larger complexes.
For starters, the foundation is a slab with some stones below for drainage. Then the only wood that is used is for the forms for the concrete frames for walls and room dividers, taken away and re-used over and over. Yet we know two people who have homes using lots of wood inside. Our neighbor on the tennis court, Emilio the marble works salesman, has a living room of huge dark wood panels right out of a California showplace. That is what it reminds me of, anyway. I asked him last night, where this wood came from, and he said that there are only nut trees in Italy, that it was pine and it came from Sweden. We joked about the fact that most wood is only used for cooking pizza and breads in outdoor ovens here. Actually, this wood for pizza IS mainly cuttings from grapes and olive trees.
And Gaspare, our first landlord, had large timbers on the ceiling of his outside terrace, but they had to be replaced because the termites got the best of them. We keep finding little piles of wood dust and knew there was a big problem there! Also, the inside was knotty pine, but that was thin sheets over a thin and uninsulated frame, so we knew all too well when the wind was blowing outside.
Anyway, they use cement and concrete block for the construction of all the structures we see going up. Rerod sticks out of the cement to form connections with other parts of the building frame. Cement block, either hollow (as in the pictures here) or solid (as in our building) are then mortared into place, and the whole smoothed over with a kind of stucco. Then the inside finish is gesso and white wash, and finally, paint. We have already commented on how few house fires there are here and lately I have realized that house fires as well as car fires are usually the work of arson, most particularly, mafia retribution for not paying protection money. There are also the occasional exploding propane tanks, but those are blasts, not just fires.
And of course the illegal dumps on the road leading away from the construction site are pretty common. Once the job is done, who is going to make them clean it up?
For starters, the foundation is a slab with some stones below for drainage. Then the only wood that is used is for the forms for the concrete frames for walls and room dividers, taken away and re-used over and over. Yet we know two people who have homes using lots of wood inside. Our neighbor on the tennis court, Emilio the marble works salesman, has a living room of huge dark wood panels right out of a California showplace. That is what it reminds me of, anyway. I asked him last night, where this wood came from, and he said that there are only nut trees in Italy, that it was pine and it came from Sweden. We joked about the fact that most wood is only used for cooking pizza and breads in outdoor ovens here. Actually, this wood for pizza IS mainly cuttings from grapes and olive trees.
And Gaspare, our first landlord, had large timbers on the ceiling of his outside terrace, but they had to be replaced because the termites got the best of them. We keep finding little piles of wood dust and knew there was a big problem there! Also, the inside was knotty pine, but that was thin sheets over a thin and uninsulated frame, so we knew all too well when the wind was blowing outside.
Anyway, they use cement and concrete block for the construction of all the structures we see going up. Rerod sticks out of the cement to form connections with other parts of the building frame. Cement block, either hollow (as in the pictures here) or solid (as in our building) are then mortared into place, and the whole smoothed over with a kind of stucco. Then the inside finish is gesso and white wash, and finally, paint. We have already commented on how few house fires there are here and lately I have realized that house fires as well as car fires are usually the work of arson, most particularly, mafia retribution for not paying protection money. There are also the occasional exploding propane tanks, but those are blasts, not just fires.
And of course the illegal dumps on the road leading away from the construction site are pretty common. Once the job is done, who is going to make them clean it up?
posted by Sicilian Mama at 5:24 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home