Building Art Piece by Piece

RAVENNA, Italy — At 8 o'clock on a Monday morning, an ungodly hour for someone on vacation in Italy, I shuffled down two flights of stairs to my hotel lobby. The desk clerk pointed to the woman waiting for me. Luciana Notturni managed to be both warm and brisk as she greeted me in Italian and led me to her car. I squeezed in with her three other American students, and we were off.

We were here for a five-day workshop at the mosaic art studio that Luciana has run for 30 years. I'd taken a five-hour class once in Los Angeles, and it was enough to launch me on a small business of making mosaic decorator items. Now I wanted technical information to advance my skills. The bonus was having a week in this atmospheric but off-the-tourist-track old city.

Ravenna is on Italy's east coast, across the Adriatic Sea from the lands of the Byzantine Empire, where the art of mosaic reached its finest form around the 6th century. Ravenna was an important Byzantine possession at the time, and the art flourished there as well. Today the city's singular attraction is its collection of mosaic masterpieces, considered the best repository of the Byzantine style outside historic Constantinople.

Surprisingly, Luciana didn't take us to see any of these treasures until our third day. Maybe she didn't want to discourage us novices.

There were seven of us in the class: Keith Aleo, 36, a percussionist from Florida, wanted a mosaic-covered fireplace for his home; when he got a $10,000 estimate, he figured the money was better spent traveling to Italy and learning to do it himself. Judith Paul, 50, and Mary Piez, 44, were friends from Tennessee, where Judith has an art studio (and had done some mosaics); Mary, who managed two horse farms, was along for a lark.

From Germany came Roswita and Ulrich Birkholz--she, a drama teacher; he, a retired physicist--and Elvira Bomar, a homemaker and grandmother. All, fortunately, were English-speaking.

Manuela Farneti, author of a book on mosaic technique, was the English translator for the class.

Even with my experience, I shared the class' general feeling of being overwhelmed by the difficulty of our first lesson.

To put it in the simplest terms: Mosaic is the art of arranging colored pieces of glass or other material into forms that make a picture or design.

In Ravenna, the art is monumental, covering ceilings, walls, almost every surface of several Byzantine-era churches. We would each make two small mosaic panels: the first a copy of a detail from one of the masterpieces; the second something of our own design.