A travel guide to lost Mediterranean homes

Alongside Rudofsky and Cosenza’s architecture, the book presents a number of other works, either ideal or built, designed by twentieth-century architectural masters like José Antoni Coderch, Giulio Minoletti, Marco Zanuso, Lina Bo Bardi and Carlo Pagani.

Case fatte di Sole is a travel journal on an imaginary tour around beautiful architectural works along the coast, idealizing a way of living that, according to the author, is “still waiting to be realized, still full of unexplored possibility.” Drawings and photographs in the book masterfully transport us to dreamlike settings.

Ultimately, anticipation of the summer heat only foments the imagination, as critic and curator Luca Molinari writes in his afterword: “It is sufficient to look carefully at the drawings, the plants, the views Tavoletta has so intelligently collected to understand the sense of a search for the happiness of the sunny and summery, a search that, at one and the same time, modestly touches upon a sense of the sacred relationship with these lands, their archaic history and the nostalgic sense of an age rapidly fading before their eyes.”

The book’s case studies provide conceptual grounding for a course taken by first-year students at the “Luigi Vanvitelli” University of Campania, on which they interpret “Mediterranean myth” through design exercises. The author undertakes two compositional experiments “that confront the landscape in very different ways, placing the theme of the domestic landscape at the core, as the place where we observe spatial action become a central element.”