11 December 2025 – festival of the fat ox
Every December since about 1473 the fattest ox in Piemonte wins recognition at the fiera del bue grasso in Carrù.
December 2014
I started keeping a notebook in early February 2014. Nothing fancy, just a thing I found in the school/office supply...
November was wet
November was wet; we lost a few working days due to bad weather. Heavy rain damaged the temporary road we...
Momentum
By the end of October the project gathered momentum; sometimes it was hard to believe work had begun just one...
Pouring Concrete
The men who made our house are referred to as either operai (manual laborers) or artigiani (skilled craftsmen). Having watched...
Excavations
Excavations began immediately after demolition. Bulldozers quarried out truckloads of grey and yellow clay soil, leaving a great pit due...
Demolizione!
Demolizione! In Italian or in English, the meaning is clear. The brief demolition phase, days after the gru arrived, was...
A Sense of deja vu
The morning of 20 September 2014 began with a sense of déjà vu. Once again I watched, as I had...
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Lucia Carenini: without her this website would have remained a vague fantasy. We were mere acquaintances...
The Blog
In a way, this whole web site is a collection of different blogs: there are the letters I wrote from...
