In a narrow street of Triggiano, near Bari in Apulia, Italy, Giovanni Rucci opens one of two original vaults of a derelict early 20th-century house to create Casa Verri, a six-metre patio hidden behind a listed facade.
Casa Verri sits on a narrow street at the edge of Triggiano, a village in the flat country south of Bari. From the pavement nothing appears to have changed: a rendered beige facade with arched windows, a dark door, the faint decorative cornice of an early 20th-century townhouse the local authorities have listed for preservation. The intervention is entirely internal, invisible to neighbours and passers-by, and that is the point.
The original house had been abandoned for years. Two large vaulted rooms ran deep into the block, blind on three sides, with a single frontage onto the street. The interiors were barely habitable, the darkness almost total. Photographer Federico Farinatti documents what Rucci inherited and what he made of it: a dwelling that had lost any relationship to light.
In close consultation with the municipal heritage office, Rucci removed one of the two vaults. The subtraction produced a patio, six metres high, invisible from the street and sunk into the plan at the centre of the house. Around it, old and new spaces now organise themselves across two floors, living rooms on the ground, a workspace above. The void does what the listed facade would not permit: it admits the sky.
The patio is finished in white render, its walls curving in elliptical section to soften the geometry of the cut. Pale terracotta pavers line the floor. A single folding chair and a draped burgundy cloth are the only furnishings needed to register the passage of the sun: in the images the shadow of the parapet sweeps across the render like a giant sundial, deep at one edge and cream-bright at the other. In summer the curve offers shade; in winter it funnels low Apulian light into the bedrooms.
The interiors address the new court with restraint. Floor-to-ceiling sliding panels in frameless glass and opaque cream plaster alternate across a herringbone-tiled threshold. A round dining table is set in an alcove cut from whitewashed render, a corridor leads past burgundy joinery to a bedroom on a sage-green base, a curved archway marks the transition to a bathroom of burgundy cabinets and terrazzo. The palette is narrow: plaster, cream tile, terracotta, two lacquered accents of burgundy and green. Nothing competes with the void.
Seen from the roof at dusk, the parapet of the patio rises from the terrace as a single curved lip of ochre render, catching the last light while television aerials and stacked balconies press in on every side. Casa Verri never announces itself on the street. The house is now organised around a piece of sky that the neighbours cannot see, a quiet act of planning that treats the listed facade not as a constraint but as a cover story.
