Renovation
Casa Malaparte was abandoned and neglected after the death of Curzio Malaparte in 1957. It suffered both from vandalism and natural elements for many years and was seriously damaged, including the desecration of a beautiful tiled stove, before the first serious renovation started in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The building was donated to the Foundation Giorgio Ronchi in 1972.
Malaparte's great-nephew, Niccolò Rositani, is primarily responsible for restoring the house to a livable state. Much of the original furniture is still there, because it is too large to remove. The marble sunken tub in the bedroom of his mistress still exists and functions. His bedroom and book lined study are still intact. Many Italian industrialists have donated materials for the preservation.
Today the house is used for serious study and certain cultural events in Italy and is admired (and hated) by many architecture enthusiasts worldwide.
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Famous quotes containing the word renovation:
“Forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance. Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away, and which new images are striving to obliterate. If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in their former place.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)