All done

The painters started work on Monday. By Thursday afternoon they were finished. I am deeply pleased with the results. Now the apartment really feels like our space, and not a rental that we're squatting in.

When we bought the place, in December 2017, it had been rented out for years and the walls were covered with the kind of low-end white paint that's reminiscent of everyone's first apartment--a white that's both dead and too bright, and that rubs off on your clothes. Photos, at least mine, don't really do justice to how crummy that paint looked.

Living room, March 2018

But the zombie white was still vastly preferable to that godawful mural in the master bedroom.

By the way, in the course of this process I learned that in Italian painters of portraits and Renaissance murals are "pittori," but people who paint houses are "imbianchini"--whitewashers--even when they're not painting everything white.

Our imbianchini painted both our bedroom and the living room a pale peach.

Bedroom in progress. Addio, tree mural.

Marcello, il padrone, checking how the living room was coming along.

My phone camera doesn't seem able to accurately capture any of the paint colors, which isn't surprising, since in real life the color seems to change depending on time of day and where I'm standing.

Here's the finished living room, looking a bit peachier in the photo than it actually does.

A beautiful blank wall.

The color works well in the bedroom, too. Danny thinks it makes us look younger--an illusion, to my mind, but a pleasant one.

Another problem with my phone's photography skills is that it can't show the indoors and outdoors simultaneously. One thing I like about this color is the way it contrasts with the yellow building that the bedroom looks out on and with the bright gold building across the street from the living room, but I don't seem to be able to show you.

The two guest rooms are now a soft blue-green.

I'm only showing one of the guest rooms because the other one hasn't been tidied up yet.

The color that pleases me most is the green in the dining room, which sadly is the one that my phone seems least able to capture.

In real life the color is less minty and more olive. It looks great with our green table, which inspired the whole color scheme, and with that tile on the wall, which we inherited from the era when the dining room had been turned into a kitchen. 

As you can see, we haven't put all the pictures back up on the walls yet.

I was surprised by the hand-painted bordini (little borders) that the painters put around the tops of all the walls wherever color met white ceiling. At first I thought they'd used masking tape to make the juncture tidy and had neglected to remove it. Then I realized it was permanent.

This is the guest bedroom, which is not actually painted in two different colors.

They did the same thing around the doorways in and out of the dining room.

That border is painted on, not structural.

I like the way the little borders look but I wondered why they'd done it (and whether it was going to cost extra.) Marcello, the head of the company that did the painting, explained to me that this is standard procedure--no additional charge. 

The reason is that buildings in Italy are often crooked, That's obviously true of houses that are hundreds of years old, but it applies to our building, too. Even though it was built relatively recently (sometime in the 1960s or 1970s), it is not at all straight, as we realize every time we put in cabinets or measure the floors for rugs. I have not idea why this is, and probably don't want to.

Under those circumstances, when a colored wall meets a white ceiling, the resulting line can look noticeably wavy rather than straight. Ditto with the doors if their off-kilter-ness isn't concealed by door frames. Marcello explained that painting a straight border along the edges fools the eye into thinking everything is lining up properly. 

It makes me think of all those sculptures of cherubs and angels on old church ceilings that are actually not carved in marble but just much more economical trompe-l'oeil paintings. It also evokes the Italian expression "fare una bella figura"--the need to look good, to make a good impression, that is so central to Italian-ness. Our apartment may be all out of whack, but thanks to Marcello and his men, no one but us need ever know.