To visit a city one knows well can resemble a Via Crucis, not because it is painful, but because one retraces set stages as in a ritual. In Rome, I cannot miss Pietro da Cortona’s The Triumph of Divine Providence at Palazzo Barberini. Whenever I pass through Rome, I return to lose myself beneath that vault. This must be how its compositional structure became part of me.
When I was commissioned to create the vault of the barrel cellar at Agricola Bellaria in Roccabascerana (Avellino) − the largest vault I have ever worked on − the structure of the Triumph presented itself to me as the very idea of a vault. It was its light that guided me in Trapasso tropicale (“Tropical Passing”): a light that I understood as the light of passing, not a light that illuminates, but a light that accompanies; a light that seems to come from within things rather than fall upon them. It seemed to me the most fitting choice for a cellar that never sees daylight.
