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TRAVELLER
PROPERTY
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ROME
painter Simona Weller (the Pope numbers among her
fans) and noted sculptor Constantino Morosin – while
others specialise in jewellery making, pottery painting
or traditional crafts. All live in unusual houses, and
some even in caves, hollowed out of the tuff (volcanic
rock) in pre-Roman times by the
ancient Etruscans to make sacred
spaces for their temples.
In Calcata, culture is king. Concerts
and exhibitions of all kinds are held at
the local granary-turned-arts centre,
Il Granarone (
ilgranarone.com
),
attracting visitors fromacross Italy,
while themain piazza is linedwith
art showrooms andworkshops. In the
evenings, livemusic plays at La Grotta
dei Germogli, the rough-hewn bar in
caves on the other side of the village, to
denizens fromaround the globe.
“Calcata is a microcosm of the
world,” says Marijcke van der
Maden, a Dutch marionette-maker
who now runs Il Granarone. She
introduces me to neighbours from
Germany, Belgium and the USA, as
well as Italy. Van der Maden herself
arrived in 1984, when she was
invited to host a show of her work in
the village. “They said that I would
like the place, as it’s small like my puppets,” she says
with a smile.
This unusually bohemian corner of rural Italy
came about after a series of earthquakes caused the
government to declare a number of villages across the
country – including Calcata – unsafe to live in, and to
evacuate its original inhabitants to a new town up the
road. Paolo Portoghesi, originally fromRome, had come
here as a youth in the 1950s, before the exodus of the
original villagers. On his return in 1972, he was shocked
to see that the village had been left to rot.
“People had abandoned it and it became a ghost town,”
he says, explaining his decision to exploit a loophole in the
law and invest in a former stable up on the hill, where his
impressive stone house stands today. “It was forbidden
to sell the buildings, but people could still buy them,” he
explains. Other people soon followed, attracted by the
idea of creating a cosmopolitan retreat.
“All the beautiful people came,” he says, “from
aristocracy to themovie industry.” The village became a
fashionable place to live or have a second home – “Stefania
Sandrelli, the famous actress, lived here for many years”
– it also became known for its new-age ideals. “Many of
the people had certain avant-garde beliefs – ambientalists
[environmentalist] and vegetarians.”
Bruno and Paola, the owners of the local Rock Caffé
bar (
3 via Forno di Corte
) are a good example of this.
They moved here in the 1980s, attracted by the idea of a
safe, traffic-free place to raise their daughters. “In Calcata,
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all children are our children,” Bruno says. “If I saw a
snotty nose or whatever, I would just wipe it. Why would
I not? You don’t get that in Rome.”
Despite the influx of freethinkers, Calcata was
never a commune. Its 60 or so regular inhabitants live
separate lives, albeit very close together. The place is
tiny, a crammed knot of tightly knit lanes and archways,
with a higgledy-piggledy organisation of dwellings,
galleries and artists’ studios.
No house in the village is the same as another. Van
der Maden inhabits a mere 15m
2
, just a tiny rustic
kitchenette and bed shelf, which she transformed from
a disused storage area. Simona Weller’s elegant villa on
the other hand, with its fine art, cut-glass decanters
and dark wood furniture, wouldn’t look out of place in
Homes &Gardens
magazine. Of course the caves make