Essentials
Click on this LINK for practical info about how to get to the village, how and where to park, and how to get to the house. Use the menu on the left side for detailed descriptions.
Address and GPS coordinates: click this Google Maps link.On Maps you will also find many additional images. Check out the Spheres (made by my "Google-maps" son Xander)! Google has visited our town in August 2016 and has registered it with their Streetview high-resolution camera. It has been added to their Maps website early 2017: an excellent place to get your virtual tour of Bussana Vecchia
See also the Bussana Nuova map for foot path, ATM and restaurants, and the Bussana/Arma Beach map for beach suggestions.
Introduction
Friends who are interested to visit us always ask: "Can you say some more about Bussana Vecchia and about your house?" That usually initiates a story of several hours and frantic looking up of new and old photographs.
To pave the way, this series of pages provide you with detail of the artist house used by English sculptor Joan Armitage-Moore (1909 - 1996) in the late 1960's and 70's.
Joan Moore specialised in steel and enamelled steel and according to my great friend the late sir Colin Sidney WIlmot "had a wicked tongue and a clear vision". She married sculptor Kenneth Armitage (1916 - 2002) in 1940 but lived separate since the mid 1950's. Although Kenneth always had a muse on his side, he and Joan were great friends.
Kenneth dedicated a retrospective to Joan in 1997. Besides the house in Bussana they had a studio in Highgate, London.
Joan Augusta Monro Moore, Swans Kenneth Armitage (Museum Fundatie, Zwolle)
oil on board 1973
Besides a water connection shared with multiple other houses, Joan's house offered no amenities. A sewer system was constructed in the 1970's by the artist community. To pay for these expenses, Joan traded her downstairs gallery with her friend Vanni who has made little use of it in the past fifty years, unfortunately.
Sculpting in Bussana became too cumbersome at an advance age, so Joan put her nephew, and my friend, Mundy in charge of the house and that's how I came to live in this wonderful ruined house since 1981.
First time i visited Bussana was in my childhood, with my parents, in 1968. For many summers, we stayed at the Blue Beach bungalows (at the time managed by the "sympathic" Friesian Bert Terpstra). The nearby hippie village Bussana Vecchia, mostly deserted at the time, was a great place to explore. Bars like the Fraschetta and the Osteria were famous for its lavish parties.
From day one I started dreaming about restoring this house back to its original status, where feasible by using the same rubblestone practices that were used by its builders in the 13th century, but also making sure that modern building safety standards were adhered to, and with addition of several key new elements (bathroom and kitchen) to meet today's needs. This required time, knowledge, and money.
Vintage picture from 1985, where I'm making plans to close the non-existant entrance arched ro85
CasaJoan has seen little change since the 1887 earthquake (and its destruction with dynamite by the Sanremo municipality in the 1950's) until I started serious restoration activities in the late 1990's, with completion around summer 2005. Several key architectural-structural aspects of this house were kindly supported by Master Stonemason Ian Cramb.
Ian Cramb was one the few authorities in the world on medieval construction practices, specifically on rubble-stone construction. Ian restored multiple medieval castles and churches in Scotland and England and supervised the construction of the St. John the Divine church in New York City, the world's largest catholic church. Ian Cramb also became famous for his design and construction of Eric Clapton's rubble-stone castle on the island of Antigua, completed early this century (Eric now rents it out for only $50,000 per week). I am indebted to Ian Cramb for his invaluable advice for this restoration project. Sadly, Ian passed away in July 2013 at the respectable age of 85.
A key problem with many restorations is that they make use of cement mortar which is too strong for rubblestone walls. Hairline cracks will appear within few years letting moisture in that, helped by cold winter weather, will eventually break down the thickest walls. Lime mortar is the way to go for these medieval buildings.
My stairway is one of the most photographed objects in town.The entrance to Casajoan is on left side at the top of the stairs. The entrance door with the little pergola is from my other house, casa Miriam, named after the artist Miriam Haworth. The decorations are done by her daughter Jann Haworth (later known for her design of the Sgt Pepper album for the Beatles).
The structure of CasaJoan enables four adults, with two children or guests, to enjoy the house while maintaining bedroom and bathroom privacy.
News
update April 2024
- My friend Angelo (Casa degli Archi, make sure to visit) gave me a huge wooden cabinet with lion heads, built for his grandmother in Milan in the early 1900's. I've transferred its lower section into a cabinet for the studio bedroom in 2019, and in 2021 I restructured the upper part into a terrace/lounge bank. Winter may be too harsh for the antique wood so then we will place it under the pergola.
- You may have noticed that the government was going for yet another eviction round. On July 25, 2019, it was fifity years ago that they started their first round. This time, they want to turn our town with spontaneous architecture into a Disney-like attraction and sell the houses that we restored to the highest bidder. You can read my response to this ridiculous plan HERE.
Current (2024) status is that these eviction attempts are on hold. The government doesn't have funding for BV and the European funding was awarded to another town nearby (who will likely burn this money on administrative staff within a few years before restorations could take place). - Many of us in Bussana Vecchia thought that the destruction of our houses was caused by the 1887 earthquake. A major mistake. Historian and professor Nilo Calvini researched the town in the 1980's and concluded that a major part was destroyed by the muncipality of Sanremo in the 1950's. I collected a large series of early photographs taken between 1887 and the 1960's. They clearly show that many of the houses in the lower part of town (the "artistic" part) were still in good shape in the 1930's.
I've dedicated a long web page on the work of professor Calvini and made a crude English translation of some of the key chapers in one of his books. You can find it HERE. Some of these photographs are on display in the village, for example in the above mentioned house of Angelo: Casa degli Archi