On June 20, Silvia Catitti, ISI Florence Professor of Architecture History, will lead a special visit to the woods of Montececeri, the hill South-East of Fiesole.

The experience is part of the project “Fiesole, an Educating City. Strategies and actions for rethinking the city, starting from schools” promoted by the Municipality of Fiesole and entrusted to the DIDA – Department of Architecture of the University of Florence.

The excursion follows the international format of the Jane’s Walks, urban walks inspired by Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), North-American anthropologist, urban planner, and activist, who viewed the city as a living organism, an ecosystem of relationships between people, spaces, daily uses, memories, and territory.

To restore visibility of the abandoned quarries of the famous gray sandstone from Fiesole, and to give voice the extinct community of Fiesole stonecutters, in her Jane’s Walk, Professor Catitti will discuss ‘Social Identity’. This is the fourth layer from the theory of the Men’s Five Skins by Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000). The Austrian artist-philosopher and architect imagined the relationship between the individual and the environment as a system of interrelated layers: the skin, clothes, the home, social and cultural identity, up to the global environment. These provided the theme of this cycle of five Jane Walks, organized by DIDA.

Professor Catitti became deeply interested in the quarrying activity and to the orally-transmitted knowledge of carving Pietra Serena, when she moved permanently to Fiesole from Rome in 2003.

In 2018 she published an article, “Grasping with your eyes”. Experiential Learning with the Last Maestro of Pietra Serena Sandstone in Fiesole, in the issue Maestro of Il Quaderno, ISI Florence architecture journal.