After three-and-a-half years of construction....at a leisurely pace that would make a sleepy Italian village proud...our newest exhibit, "La Piazza" is finally open!
We luxuriated in the gift of time to let the details of this exhibit percolate gradually. The months of pandemic shutdown meant that we could avoid the rush to open the room. We started construction work in January 2019, and we opened to visitors for the first time in mid-August 2022. Yesterday, Cassandra Day from the Middletown Press came by and took some pictures and posted an article.
There are a million little personal stories embedded in this room - waves of sadness and loss, moments when we got caught up in the beauty, bits of exhibit mechanics that we tested and rebuilt and tested again. Connections to history, like the myth of Arion, a teenage musician who rebelled by running off to Sicily to play music, then returning home on the back of a dolphin. Sicily is a place that has seen its share of conquerors - so we borrowed from the Roman, Greek, Arab and Renaissance traditions that pop up in the art and architecture of the island. And then there's Middletown, which is more than just a place, and somehow seems to have crossed the ocean to pop up in weird ways in our little village (If you peer inside the shutters of the cafe, that's a memory of Connie Marino, nee Vitale, whose bakery/restaurant on Ferry Street was one of the lost spots of Italian downtown culture that we wanted to remember).
Is it just luck that my partners in design, Matt Niland (maker/inventor) and Scott Kessel (artist/painter/sculptor), were just the right people to make these dreams come to life? I can't imagine trying something like this without you -- this room is filled with all the talent and good energy that you bring. And I have more people to thank for coming on this journey to the "Greek" side of Sicily. Sioux Wimler borrowed time from the front desk to dye endless batches of silk to find just the right mix; Liv Elmore & Clara Gainer spent months grinding bits of rubber to craft a "stone" cobblestone floor; and Chris Mathison worked with Matt to lift the floorboards and create the maze of pipes that makes the dolphin fountain work. And Lucia Pettruziello was there from the very beginning....I'm remember a day when she and Artemis Trowbridge-Wheeler (both in their early teens) spent the afternoon helping me chalk out an "idea" for a scarf fountain...all the way to opening, when (now in her late teens) she put off getting a manicure so that she could knot-tie dozens of scarves into tiny leaves for the olive tree. Everyone at Kidcity during these years touched this room in some way....thank you!
Finally, thanks to a certain spirit, or at least a lively memory, that inhabits our building (which used to be a convent for the St. Sebastian's Church, the center of the Italian immigrant experience in Middletown). To that spirit we say: we hope you feel the love that we put into this room, as we imagined the magical childhood remembered moments that must have been brought along from the old country - to then be shared and take on a life of their own among the people of Middletown, both those who were originally from Melilli, Sicily, and their new neighbors here in New England.
Come play!
