Insula Ostiense

In the Insula Ostiense wallpaper I find again the rough, proud voice of imperial Roman building, that of the apartment blocks which filled the streets of Rome and of its ports. The design belongs to the imperial Roman style and shows, frontal and edifying, a whole brick block four storeys high: at ground level the tabernae open in round arches, framed by brick piers and lintels; above, three bands of small rectangular windows mark a severe rhythm within the bare brick, while wooden balconies with plain balustrades and worn boards cast light shadows, band after band, storey after storey.

There is no emptiness in this façade: every arch, every cornice, every wooden board belongs to a single dense body, where commerce and dwelling overlap without a break. It is the image of a city that does not separate work from life, the shop from the balcony: a horizontal hierarchy, clear, bearing the weight of the centuries with the same discipline with which it was built.

I bring this architecture to the wall the way one brings a fragment of real stone: the colours are those of brick burnt by the sun, of pale plaster flaking away, of the deep shadow inside every opening. In our workshop we choose materials and printing able to render, from far and near, the grain of every brick and the fibre of weathered wood. To live beside this wallpaper is to live beside a memory that is built, measured, lasting.