26.Roof Tiles

There was always plenty of interesting work for me to do at Il Poggio.


First Elisabetta had me paint numbers on the doors of her guest rooms with colorful animal cartoons as a part of the number. That was fun and luckily I had brought some tubes of acrylic paint and brushes with me in my little yellow wagon.


She said some of her guests had told her that there were scurrying noises coming from the ceiling in one of her upstairs rooms and she thought some squirrels had decided to move in so she asked me to help a couple of her regular workmen to solve the problem by removing the false ceiling from the room and opening it to its original height--which was about fourteen feet high.


She said that one of the previous owners had thought to modernize the room by putting in a regular eight foot ceiling, but she actually preferred the old original--open to the very pretty old pink fired clay tiles of the roof overhead.


There was some other work which also needed to be done to the tile roof, so we climbed up and removed and cleaned some of the original tiles.


The Italian workmen demonstrated for me the ancient method of making the tiles. They were formed from a thick sheet of clay being laid on the artisan's muscular thigh, then dried and fired.


These were the original tiles used by the workers hired by the Medici family in the original construction and some of the tiles had five or six inches of moss growing on them. We had to scrape off some of the moss to see if they were sound and so forth, but the workmen tried not to move too much of the moss because it takes so long to grow--it has their respect.

(We never found any trace of squirrels.)

...