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From Frescoes to Flowers
A Tour of Italy By Teri Brown
Want to add an Italian feel to your home? Reproductions of classic Italian frescoes are easy to purchase as prints, but what if you want a real fresco? Italian fresco artists Sergio Bonometti and Giovanni Bressana have the solution.
The pair began Classic Decorum, a small, exclusive company that offers authentic frescoes painted much as they were during the Renaissance. The frescoes are first painted on a stone wall on fresh plaster and then removed from the wall – with a technique approved for restoring those in historic buildings – and glued to the canvas.
"This technique gives our items the soft colors and the same look as frescoes painted hundreds and thousands of years ago," says Paolo Nascimbeni, the U.S. representative for Classic Decorum. "The methods we use are what set us apart from others who paint frescoes.
"Frescoes represent a very important aspect of Italian art," he says. "All the major painters of Italy used this graphic art sooner or later."
Classic Decorum's frescoes are made to customer specifications and can be completed in about one week.
Because of the summer heat and lack of rainfall, there are few perennial beds in Italy. The main flowering seasons in the wild are in the spring and fall. Formal Italian gardens are known for the geometric shapes of their shrubs and the use of fountains and pools. Sun and shade are used as design elements as well. Pots of plants like hydrangeas are organized near buildings to give color to the mostly green gardens. Views framed with trees or plants and used as an extension of the garden are another trademark of the Italian garden.
Landscape historian Sandra Price, who spends much of her free time helping to restore historic gardens in Italy, understands the allure of the formal Italian garden. "The aspect of the classic Italian garden which carries over today is that gardens were meant to be enjoyed," she says. "They were places you went to talk or eat or walk or experience being out of doors. People always invite you to come visit the garden when the light is best, whether that time is 3 p.m. or 5:30 or noon."
For tourists looking to see some of these gardens for themselves, Price offers tour packages to some of her favorite gardens off the beaten path. Instead of going from hotel to hotel as in most tours, she and her guests stay at Castello di Spannocchia, the field headquarters of the Etruscan Foundation, and take day trips to gardens around the area. "I realized I could act as the interpreter and offer people a view of classic Italian gardens that were uncrowded and delightful to behold," Price says.
Some of the most beautiful examples of classic Italian gardens were created for the powerful Medici family, including the gardens of the Villa Medicea di Castello in Firenze, with its more than 500 lemons in pots. The gardens of the Villa Medicea di Petraia, also in Firenze, are lovely as well, though part of the gardens were redone in a more Victorian style in the 1800s when Victorian gardens were fashionable.
