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In the meantime, Pete the Welshman had married Dora the Artist sister of Elisabetta and they invited me to visit them in Switzerland.
At the time I was pretty furry--with a full beard and longish hair--sort of a hippy-looking chap--so I expected some sort of border problems crossing from Italy into Switzerland, but I told the customs officer I was visiting friends and mentioned their names and the village they had given me directions to--the officer waved me and my bike through and wished me a pleasant stay in Switzerland.
Pete was such a fun person to be around. Everything he did was done with maximum energy and enthusiasm--he was one of three young men I was lucky to meet in this lifetime: Nordic Norm in Lassen County California, Brian Callahan in Sonoma County, California and Pete at Il Poggio and now in Switzerland.
When I found the cottage of Dora and Pete, Pete immediately took off from whatever he was doing and took me for a spin by bicycle further into the mountains to see a religious community he thought I should visit.
Pete had a classic antique bicycle he had found and restored and was immensely proud of--especially its real leather covered narrow seat. I stripped my own funky German old-man-going-to-buy-bread bicycle of its bags and bottles and we took off.
It was a beautiful Swiss day and everything was fine.
Pete slalomed back and forth across the empty paved road with his usual joie de vivre which was so contagious--I started swooping with him.
There was a house at a sharp curve in the road and there was a cherry tree in its garden loaded with fruit hanging out over the road. I grabbed one cherry as I swooped under and around the tree.
"I thought pilgrims were not supposed to steal!" Pete cheerfully reprimanded me when we paused--and remember this is Switzerland. one of the very few places in this world where the inhabitants do not steal anything.
...
While I was at Il Poggio there was a death in my family.
Bro Joe, that good guy, found out where I was (which took some detective work) and telephoned that Dad (Andy Wold) had died at home of a brain aneurism in Ventura, California. This was the only phone call I got during the long pilgrimage.
Dad had been feeling weak and had some painful back trouble before I left but both he and my mother, Lorene, seemed healthy enough to last some time--at least until I had finished this pilgrimage and had returned to the USA.
Dad had always been very good to me.
After Joe called I walked to the little church in San Vicenzo a Torre and sat for a while thinking about everything.
There is really nothing like the death of a parent to set one thinking as you either know or will find out some day.
In a way I was sorry I was not there to help out and in another way I was glad I had missed all the emotion and sadness of my grieving family the my parent's friends.
I was a long way away from Ventura, there was nothing I could do and I would continue my slow pilgrimage to Holy Mountain in Greece in the spring.
...
One of the things I liked best about Il Poggio was that it was a place with a lot of history.
What is old to an American just can't be as old as the old things here in Italy and I really liked that fact.
For example I was scouting out the neighborhood and followed a path behind the Il Poggio buildings and into the countryside. A couple of hundred yards along this woodsy path I came to a babbling brook issuing from a cavern in a hill.
I went into the darkish cavern and discovered that it was made with mostly collapsed old brick arches with a floor of dressed stones--and buried in the sandy clay bed of the stream was a big millstone--which weighed, I guess, several hundred pounds.
What the heck--this hillside must be part of an old dam. And this millstone must at one time have been part of a regular mill--a flour mill maybe before this country was all turned into vineyards.
When I asked Elisabetta about it she said that Il Poggio had at one time been a monastery and the monks had dammed the stream in the valley to produce water power for a mill!
This was all long ago. The mill had been ruined for years--maybe hundreds of years--and all that was left was the partially collapsed cavern and the half buried old millstones.
Lovers sometimes made the cavern a romantic trysting place these days. She said if you looked you could see places where candles had burned on long summer nights down by the old mill stream.
....
In the time I am writing about, Germany was divided into two sectors--east (the DDR soviet side) and west. As an American citizen I was welcome to come and go in the western sector, but not the east. The east was closed to Americans.
Before I came to Il Poggio I had been visiting friends in west Germany--in the province of Hesse--and I was riding with Siggy (Siegfried) one evening and asked him when he thought the wall separating the east and the west would come down. He said: "Not in my lifetime"--and that seemed to be the general opinion in west Germany.
I was on the road a few months pilgrimming before I got to Il Poggio and I had been at Il Poggio a short while when three East German young people in an old car arrived on their way to Rome.
Their car was jammed with stuff and they were a happy and carefree lot it seemed to me.
They told us this story: they were sitting in their apartment one evening when some friends stopped by and said that the guards at the wall separating east and west Germany were letting everyone pass through--no questions asked--no passports needed.
So these intrepid three--two girls and one young man--tossed everything they thought they might need into their old car and crossed to the forbidden west--and here they were.
I don't know how they found about Il Poggio but they stayed a couple of days and left for Rome.
I was so impressed I made a Wall sculpture with little figures climbing ladders and so forth and standing on a wall with the dates of the opening of east Germany and incised some kind of remark about freedom in English, German and Italian. I would have done it in French too but my French is too bad.
After Elisabetta fired the sculpture, I placed it on a pedestal in the Il Poggio garden.
...
In the ceramics studio at LIl Poggio there were some small circular metal platforms which you could turn when you were working on a pot or vase and I discovered that they were perfect for building a ceramic portrait head on.
I know now that these devices are called banding wheels on sculpture stands. They spin and make it easy to look at the totality of anything in clay you are working on--like a full-sized portrait head, for example.
That's what I started using them for and it was good fun.
I got people to sit for me while I made portrait heads of them in clay.
The biggest problem, of course, was that the heads had to be hollow so they wouldn't explode in the kiln but I licked this problem by making a kind of honeycomb structure beneath the final head.
Another problem was controlling the drying of the portrait--if it was not done carefully, the clay would crack.
I learned to do this by judiciously keeping the head covered with a plastic bag except for short periods of time when I was in the studio to monitor the drying process.
These things took a longish time to make so I only finished about six in the several months I stayed at Il Poggio--some only bisque fired and some of them color glazed fired.
Tilo, Elisabetta's grown son, posed for me so I had the opportunity of making a life-sized portrait of him--a sensitive, handsome young man with lots of long wavy hair which I enjoyed making by layering thinner slabs of clay. This portrait was bisque-fired but not colored since it was effective as a work of art as plain reddish stoneware.
I found later, after I had left Il Poggio, that stoneware masks and portrait heads were made here in Tuscany long, long ago--so I was following, without knowing it, a very old tradition.
...
.
I got right back into the ceramica and clay work too.
Since I was on a pilgrimage to some Christian Holy Places and had been using the old Greek Jesus Prayer mantra as I rode my bike, (Kyrie Jesu Christe eleson mas) I thought I would make some little crucifixes out of clay.
This turned into a very interesting project for me and I made a lot of them--all about eight inches tall and four inches across at the widest spot. I rolled out the cross pieces and notched them and put them together like pieces of wood and then I made little Jesus figures--they were fun to do with Hebrew noses and kind of skinny but athletic builds.
I made tiny clay nails and used them to stick the figure on the soft clay cross and at first this seemed a good solution to an artistic problem--but then it seemed not so nice.
True this was just clay and I was just an artist--but it still didn't seem exactly right to me to be "crucifying " this little clay Jesus.
Something else.
At the time Pope John Paul the Second was the man in the Catholic Church and he carried a symbolic cross that was sort of droopy and sad looking. Well, that's OK for HIM, but I didn't feel so weepy about the whole thing, so I started by straightening the cross bar of the cross--no droop--and then I even started turning it UP like a smile. Well, why not?
But after making twenty or thirty of these things, I started to leave the cross out of the "crucifix" entirely and started to make the Jesus figure raise his arms into a dancing man.
I turned the famous crown of thorns into a crown of flowers and his famous loin-cloth into a flowery dancing costume--more like a Krishna than a Jesus, maybe..
Oh, it was good fun and absolutely unique and suited my happy feelings exactly.
When these figures were glazed with color (some totally black or deep blue) and fired they were as good as I can do.
I was pleased and Elisabetta said I could have a one-man show in her gallery whenever I wanted to. Hooray!
...
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.)
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