The Goddess granted Liliana a long and healthy life that she concluded at 101, a little more than one year after this picture was taken, on the occasion of her 100th birthday party in the garden of her home in Florence. With her, you see her daughter, Grazia, her granddaughter, Donata, and her great-granddaughter, Aurora. One of the reasons for her long life, I believe, is the quality of the home in which she lived for most of it, and in particular that she could breathe clean air in it, not being entombed in a sealed space, as it is typical of modern homes. We now live in that house and, renovating it, we decided to adapt to it rather than force it to adapt to us. Adaptation is the way of the good holobiont.
At the end of 2023, my wife and I moved into the home that had belonged to her parents and, earlier on, to her grandparents and great-grandparents. This house has a “soul,” I believe. Let’s call it a personality or maybe a “presence” that makes it a good place to live. It may have been so since the time when it was built, at least 250 years ago.
A view of the building seen from the street. My wife and I occupy the 1st floor.
This house was renovated and reshaped several times, the last one in the 1960s, and the result was an unholy mess. The natural gas heating system used old and leaky radiators; the electrical wiring was in such a bad shape that it was dangerous to use any appliance; it had no thermal insulation, ominous cracks in the walls, one small bathroom, and an even smaller toilet. The apartment maintained the structure of 18th-century homes: no corridors; every room was connected directly to the rooms nearby. Our ancestors had an interesting concept of what we call “privacy.”
How do you renovate such a building? The temptation was to rebuild more or less everything. But that would have meant a sort of architectural rape performed on a house that had a history of having hosted inhabitants for more than two centuries. We reasoned that if our ancestors had survived in it for so long, we had to be able to survive in it, too, even though some of its features were obsolete from our modern viewpoint. We arrived at a compromise based on the idea that we should adapt to the house rather than forcing it to adapt to us. On this, we were also helped by the limited budget available!
In practice, that meant keeping most of the existing structures and the “spirit” of the house where our ancestors had lived. Apart from fixing a dangerous crack in a wall, the main modification was to connect two of the old rooms with a large opening to create a modern living room. Perhaps it was a little too much, but it was done, and now it is done. I’d say the result is nice-looking. Here is the living room.
One thing we also tried to do was to maintain the old furniture to keep some continuity between the old generations and ours. Here, the floor lamp belonged to Grazia’s parents. The blue armchair belonged to my grandmother, and the yellow one to my parents. The chandelier belonged to my parents. My mother created the decoration of the small table in front of the sofa and also the painting that stands on a tripod that belonged to my great-great grandfather. The tree out of the window was created by the Goddess Gaia herself.
Note the arched windows of the living room. Although probably at least one hundred years old (perhaps more than that), they were still in reasonably good shape. But not all the windows are arched; here is the one in our bedroom. Nice and sunny, and from it, we can pick oranges directly from the tree.
The mix of new and old is especially obvious in the kitchen, where the appliances are brand new and super-modern; note the induction cooktop. But note also the floor tiles; we made a special effort to keep the original ones, probably from the 1920s. Note also the original window giving on the sunny garden, outside. You can reach the garden from the kitchen by a flight of stairs.
The house also has other remarkable features. One is that the ceilings are at a height of four meters! Here is my studio. Note the books on the floor; the renovation is still a work in progress. Note also the 19th century clock on the wall, still perfectly working.
I was perplexed about these high ceilings. Why waste so much space, and how can you warm such a huge volume in winter? But, in the end, my impression is that our ancestors knew what they were doing. High ceilings mean more breathable air and a healthier environment.
Certainly, warming this home in winter is a problem. It is enhanced by the fact that we decided to keep the old, hand-made glass panes at the windows. It is a heresy from the modern viewpoint that sees insulation as an all-important feature. And it is not just a question of insulation; look at the gap between the two panels of this window (and also the beautiful painted ceiling, four meters high!)
The gap could be sealed, and the old glass panes replaced with modern ones. But we decided we didn’t want to do that. The gap is one of the features of the house that ensures ventilation inside. About insulation, my wife remembers that, when she was a child, in winter, she would sometimes wake up in the morning to find that the water in the wash basin in her room had frozen at the top. She survived that, and people survived the lack of insulation in this home for more than two centuries. We can survive that too.
The existential philosophy of this kind of house is not to insulate its inside to a uniform temperature of, maybe, 25 C. With its thick walls (60 cm), the house's thermal mass is gigantic compared to that of a typically thin-walled modern house. It is just a different concept. Thermal inertia is the main feature of these homes so you have to adopt a different way of heating it. The old house had fireplaces and wooden stoves; unfortunately, they were all destroyed, except one, during the restructuring of the 1960s. So, we kept the old heating system that once burned heating oil and now burns natural gas. But we also installed heat pumps with the idea of warming only single rooms, not the whole apartment. This is a great idea to save energy.
We can do even better than that. Isn’t it cheaper to insulate a thin layer around oneself rather than spending a lot of money to insulate an entire room or the whole house? And here I am with my dragon suit in pile fabric and an extra layer of pile over it. The air temperature when this photo was taken was around 17 C — perfectly liveable.
Finally, here are some data on the quality of the air inside.
I check humidity, temperature, CO2 concentration, and even radioactivity. All these parameters are in a range that should be excellent for health. Note the CO2 concentration: it usually stays between 500 ppm and 600 ppm. The average value outside is 420 ppm, and values higher than 600-700 are not recommended.
In the end, the philosophy of living in this old house is to adapt to what the house is rather than forcing it to become what we want it to be. We don’t want to turn it into a sort of spaceship cabin, complete with a life support system, as many modern homes tend to be. In many cases, these homes are so well sealed that the air inside is unhealthy for many reasons: too much CO2 and God knows what other poisons develop when the windows are sealed tight.
It is the way of the holobiont. You adapt, you change, you do not force anything to be what you want it to be. Onward, fellow holobionts!
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A small detail about what it is like when you live in an old house. We were restoring an old table, and we found this on one of the internal planks.
It reads “Lippi Pietro,” and it is the name of Grazia’s great-grandfather. It is written with the last name first, as it was normal to do in Italy long ago. This signature must be at least one hundred years old, and it gives you a remarkable sensation of continuity and kinship with the people who inhabited the house before us. This place must be full of ghosts at night, but they are very quiet and, so far, they never disturbed our sleep.
h/t our wonderful architect, Serena Biancalani, who perfectly understood what we wanted to do with the renovation and helped us do it.
Nice family photograph, Ugo, congratulations. And nice home, indeed. I remember your past post about description on the high quality for thermal comfort in the sub room, and photo of Grazia showing the small vent window. Greetings
This house is a home.
:-)