The first floor and the Noble Wing

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Descrizione

History is made up of crossroads, where stories intersect to combine or give way to one another. Places at the center, but also on the margins, serving as connections or demarcations. This hallway is just such a place, a crossroads where different styles and eras come together and emerge, revealing what can still be found but also what has been lost.

This is the point where the different wings making up the castle meet. There is the Noble Wing on one side, thought to be the oldest part of the castle, and the Chapel on another, and then the “twin” wings known today as the Historical Wing and the New Wing. Here especially, the conservative approach taken to the restoration of the decorative schemes gives us unique insight into the history of this place, its transformations and adaptations to satisfy new living needs and the stylistic tastes of era after era.

The architectural motifs of the wall decorations would appear to have been an original feature of all the interiors. Their traces have been found and carefully restored, where possible, in all the different rooms.

The deeper layers here present nineteenth-century frescoes. Hammer signs can be seen where the surface was tapped to help new layers of plaster stick to the wall. The old frescoes were covered over in the twentieth century with new, darker and less attractive decorations.

The composition of the plasters used tells us much about the numerous renovations and their purpose. In some places, smoother sections of wall give way to more “rough and ready” surfaces, especially around door frames, suggesting that the doorway was originally bigger and later reduced in size.

This place is a passageway, in more than one sense. The stratigraphic patches on the walls open up a dimension of time in which different eras meet to then move on, rendering space a theater of possibility and not an unequivocal choice. It is a place where the ages come together and direction is lost, in something like a labyrinth, “an obvious symbol of perplexity,” said Jorge Luis Borges, where the problem of time and identity comes to the fore.

Unwittingly metaphorical yet mysteriously clear, the hallway invites us to stop and think about the spirit of this place, about how in the silence of its presence it speaks to us of what is absent. How its simple existence here opens up and reveals so much about its being and becoming. About past and future. About coming and going.