I was twenty-seven and I had no talent (at least that was what I believed) but I had lots of other small virtues, an irrepressible love for nature, an unrestrained firmness, the will to dare and a strange attitude to fix broken things, the older and the uglier, the better. As a child I used to dress up the most worn out dolls properly and they were as good as new, or I used to water and take care of dying plants and, as a miracle, they recovered beautifully.

As time went by I understood what was my bizarre mission in life: I would turn a little piece of ugly and abandoned world into my dream land and live there. The place was easy to find: as I saw it, I understood that that was the right place. It was located in the historical centre of my town but nobody seemed interested in it. It was classified as a decayed area and its name Vicolo Capannetti (Huts Alley) stands to show that up to the beginning of last century, only poor modest houses were there, precisely huts. A place were poor people had lived for ages.

I loved it right away. Too narrow for cars to enter: the perfect condition to create a place on a human scale. An old lonely jujube tree among that desolate grey became my guide: it showed me the way to take. Mice, cockroaches, mould, nothing scared me. I was a young woman, full of passion with a project in mind. It was difficult to convince my neighbours to surrender to the fact that the plants and flowers I had in mind to plant would bring back life as a vital lymph.

After ten long years of doubtful, hesitant glances finally, my heroic neighbour Giuseppe took a mallet, a pick, a stone chisel and a pneumatic hammer and together we hoed up stripes of asphalt in the alley near our houses. We cleared some soil, a revolutionary, anarchic, liberating gesture. We dug holes here and there and happy as children we planted jasmine plants, irises, roses, a calycanthus, oleanders. We resumed a small piece of land, a symbolic gesture, and we planted sage, basil, rosemary, a pomegranate tree and two grapevines of white grapes. Such a happiness! and how many changes! A return to life.

One day under the pomegranate tree a nice mushroom appeared and I felt emotional with no reason. After the real renovation of the house, the conversion of the environment was done using nature as an ally. Nature only can revivify and fix everything. I experienced a marvellous coexistence among nature, houses and human beings, leaving plants free to cover my house and to enter more and more, into my life. The genius loci which I had feared dead, in reality was only in exile. He has come back happy and he often whispers lovely advices to get things even better and I always take his advices.

The tiny green areas have multiplied as my eyes are always at work searching for new spots, my plants help me, comfort me, they save me. I like to share my place and so little by little the value of hospitality has become my job. My house now is a bed&breakfast in Ravenna (Italy). The guest rooms have a gentle atmosphere with books, magazines and objects for the traveller's rest and quietness. Each room has a bathroom and there is a common kitchen for all the guests. The house is like a village house, full of character and often, something special happens: many guests leave drawings, messages, poems. I like to think that my occasional guests felt comfortable and got inspired from Ravenna and my place. Maybe they have felt the secret urgings, the vibrations of the long creative process my place has gone through and the love I have poured in it. A few days ago a couple left this poem:

Libera regnat
Protected from glances
and from distant woes
in a nest of curtains,
of hushed sounds
and minute gardens
which host ribbons of a sky
that belongs to us only,
we listen to the rain
that comes down persistent
on the gentle plants
and on the last autumn flowers
water polished.

Here we are reached by the echoes of the town
which lives on antique splendours
guardian of time
while, in peace with the world,
we breathe
the mildness of the air
the soft sounds
in the subdued light
of the house.
(M&N)

This is what my friend Mariella Busi De Logu wrote:

Vicolo Capannetti
Cycling through Borgo San Rocco you have to take one way street, Via Ravegnana.
Parked cars, moving cars, racing motorcyclists, bikers-heads down, absent-minded pedestrians.
Here people are in a hurry – elbowing their way forward.
Careful, trying to avoid the impact with all this moving traffic, I pass the alley.
I pass the alley but I realize it only when I see the Roman Gate.
I go back
I take aim.
I enter.
No, this is not it.
It's similar, no it's really different.
There it is.
Once again – it just looks like it
These alleys are like copies and I am looking for the written page, the original.
Maybe the original disappeared.
Maybe it never existed.
Maybe even Claudia was a dream. I call her on my mobile phone.
Further.
Further, backward.
On your side.
Right here.
Between two houses, the bottleneck.
A soft transparent veil divides the light from metropolitan mists.
As if it had always been there only for eyes trained to beauty.
The contrast between the main street and the alley is extreme.
Out there, fine particles, exhaust gases, shops of disposable objects, people who swallow up and squander, busy to fill up their own bottomless pit.
I raise the veil. I raise the veil and I see the Madonna.
No.
Not even Alice's wonderland. Here everything is real. I can touch it with my hands.
To my mind comes the vision and the scents of May, in Cesena, when I was a child.
I start to breathe freely, with no defences my rhythm changes.
Together with the surprise, the lightness.
On my body drops the ease that removes any persistent tensions.
The alley has walls of climbing plants.
The alley has walls of climbing plants and on the ground carpets of cobblestones with blooming edges.
A microcosm can suggest much wider dimensions than a macrocosm.
Here not walls but mountains: green in spring, blooming in summer, red and yellow in autumn.
Here not alleys but gorges.
Life is vibrating.
A kind of living reproach for the flustering development of districts just finished to build and already crumbling.
I take twenty steps.
I take twenty steps, I turn left and there, the red facade with yellow strips and glorious vines.
Giants – the giants of the enchanted mountain.
Their growth mustn't be disturbed, they are warriors in endless conquest of new territories.
Open sesame.
I enter the prehistory.
Claudia chose ruined houses for a process that is daily renewed and it has become the centre of her life: if it is ruined, I will reinforce it, if it is grey, I will paint it, if it is dark, I will bring light, if it has small decaying courtyards, I will create vertical forests.
The green of a tree and a plant, the mystery of multiplying spaces, this is what I go back to when I think of Claudia.
She lives in a condition of growth, in that unique moment of sprouting and around her, in Vicolo Capannetti, plants, pets, houses, people, live intensively and multiply.
And they multiply following desires and passions of this Spring, this spontaneous sowing season that originates directly from bushes, branches, trees, stems, leaves, water, hearth. Worms included.
Claudia's desires and passions have distant origins. In her childhood. Our origin.
We always go back there.
We always go back there to understand who we are now.
Young Claudia's hands and eyes which at school looked after small plants, know what they are doing.
Later in life the encounter with knowledge – hands and eyes – with conscience – mind – became her first garden, her first house.
Her first garden, her first house nourished by all her previous life.
Hanging gardens of Babylon, the house, mother of many more – the last one was born last summer – they could last in eternity as a reminder for all those unlikely houses that are now built; just by chance.

Translation of Vittoria Katia Zuccherelli

For more information:
Bed and Breakfast Capannetti
Vicolo Capannetti 19/15A
48100 Ravenna
Tel: + 39 0544 67588
Cell: + 39 339 6274304
www.capannetti.it