Cappelletto: A Medieval Foundation

I was born in Milan. Following my parents’ divorce when I was eight, I relocated with my mother and siblings to a Long Island suburb of New York City, Port Washington. I had to quickly adjust to a new environment, with its unfamiliar language, customs, food, and architecture, and to the American family I previously had known only from photographs. As I got older, I wanted to know more about the country I had left behind, and after finishing graduate school I spent several months in Italy traveling from north to south, visiting museums and medieval hill towns.

What stayed with me was the architecture that was so different from anything I had encountered in the States. I recalled that one my first impressions of this country even as a child was that building materials were so different here. This was in 1961, and I had gone from living in a Milan apartment building that was made of solid materials like stone and marble, to a ranch-style home built in the 1950s, with its wall-to-wall carpeting, parquet tiles, linoleum, and hollow core doors that were popular at the time.

My early memories of medieval structures in Milan and Venice provided the centering sense of history that was missing in the suburbs. My early work in graduate school and beyond touched on my immigrant experience. Architecture is the constant in my current work.