In the Oltremera district of Chiavenna, not far from the church of San Bartolomeo,a building currently undergoing restoration has always attracted the attention of the more curious. Despite having widespread peeling plaster, faded paintwork, closed and dusty shutters, the presence of beautiful architectural proportions and simple ornamental elements that clearly reference ancient construction and decoration, should not go unnoticed. We’re talking about a late 16th century noble residence in fact, built in 1582 by the Pestalozzi family, presumably by modernising and expanding a preexisting 14th century edifice.

The house extends horizontally on two floors in addition to the ground floor. The decoration still partly preserved on the side facing via Cerletti and minimally too on the northern façade, is fashioned using the graffito technique used in Chiavenna and in Val Bregaglia and Spluga between the late 15th and 16th centuries, still pretty widespread in the Grisons region. The facades within Chiavenna’s historic centre preserve rare evidence of graffito decoration; most of which were renovated after the 17th century in accord with new criterion that preferred to rough plaster, and the application of smooth and bright surfaces, whitewashed with lime and - to graffito -the creation of monochrome pictorial elements imitating stone: fake corner ashlars, string course bands, frames. Rarer, but certainly still partly hidden under layers of paint or plaster, is the polychrome of figurative paintings. Many of these have already been identified and documented during the stratigraphic investigations that I carried out on behalf of the Municipality of Chiavenna as part of a broader project for the recovery and enhancement of the historic centre, starting in 2001.

On the Oltremera building, the current intervention on the north and west facades is recovering what still survives of the graffito decoration and the 16th century plasterwork in recognition of their value, preserving the materials and restoring its memory.