entry Dec
2004
Getting in Touch with your Inner Tile
When
I first learned the Italian word for "tile"—mattonella—it seemed to me to be an
enchanting name for a woman. After all, it resembles
closely the name "Antonella," a lovely diminutive
and a good name in every respect. "Mattonella," too,
is a diminutive, but it means "little brick," so I
now see that as a term of endearment it can't hold a
kiln to "sweetheart" or even "my little chickadee".
Onward. We needed new "little
bricks" —lots of
them— for our
kitchen and bathroom floors and walls. I suggested
that we get Donato Massa to do the job. He, of
course, was the master who crafted the world-famous
majolica tiles within the courtyard of Santa Chiara in Naples,
the fine ceramic vases in the Hospital for the Incurable,
and the ceramics in the monastery
in Padula. There is even a national ceramic
competition named for him. He is Mister Tile. My
wife reminded me that if Donato is indeed still with
us, then he is 300 years old if he's a day, and the
old geezer might not welcome the five-flight hike up
to our humble digs. I then suggested linoleum,
straw, or compressed moose chips as aesthetically
pleasing alternatives. Sigh. No luck there, either.
I was thus shanghaied to stalk the wild tile —to hunt up, track
down, and mull over various styles of tiles. Miles
of styles of tiles. Piles of... (I'll stop.)
In my defense, I don't know why computer graphic programs give you "millions of colors"; it seems to me that most of us could get by with a hundred thousand or so. Also, the familiar schoolroom mnemonic, "Roy G. Biv," to help you remember the colors of the rainbow, in order, as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, doesn't mean much to me. As far as I'm concerned, that helpful fellow's name might as well be "Rob B. Bbb." I don't know the difference in Italian between blu, azzurro, and celeste. To me, it's blue, kind of blue, and somewhere between almost blue and bluish. Forget cobalt and cerulean. Who am I, Anders Ångström?
Tiles come in ceramic,
concrete, metal, resin-based fakes, marble and many
other minerals and vegetables. In Naples, the 1700s
stand out as the high point in the art of the
beautifully colored glazed ceramic pottery and tile
known as Majolica (from
the name of the island of Mallorca). Today there is
a thriving industry to provide new homes and
refurbished old homes with square meters of the
stuff for bathrooms and kitchens. Depending on
durability (important for floors) and how much
ornateness you want painted onto your little slabs
of baked hydrous aluminum silicates, even
mass-produced tiles can run from about 10 to 90
euros per square meter (that latter price is almost
$40 per sq. foot (!) at the current rate of
exchange) and well beyond that for unique art. Some
manufacturers such as those from the Capodimonte
workshops in Naples or the town of Vietri on the
Amalfi coast or from the island of Sardinia have
fine reputations going back centuries; thus, their
products are expensive. Incidentally, a slab of
industrial tile is very heavy and will hurt if you
drop it on your (my) foot.
We went to a place in nearby Pozzuoli called
The Wiles of Tiles (sorry), where their motto is,
"Buy our tiles or we will drop another one on you."
The worst display they had was a wall of itsy-bitsy
squares, a checkerboard pattern with no two adjacent
squares of the same color. It reminded me of the
famous topology problem about the fewest colors
required to make a map of
the world with no contiguous countries having the
same color. (I don't know the answer. Try blue.)
Or before war breaks out between your rod and
cone cells. Or the test you take in the army to see
if you're color blind. If you could pick out the
number from the colors, you were fine. I kept seeing
"666". I got a "weird-o" discharge.
Thus, we now have tiles. My
input was concise and helpful. Those familiar with
Jewish and Italian families will no doubt recognize
this kind of conversation.
"This is tile 1, and this is tile 2. Which one do
you like?"
"I like number 2."
"What's wrong with number 1?"
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