HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
This is a story of stones and men. Stones to build solid homes, smaller stones for decorating and embellishing them. In an era of prefabricated structures, industrial mass production and building standards, Venetian terrazzo is still widespread in the Veneto region and in Friuli, in the houses and palaces of the major cities of the arts, representing a sort of living fossil. It is proof of quality and practicality of interior flooring which has survived the insidious encroaching of novelty for centuries. Terrazzo adapts surprisingly well, and despite innovation, to uneven decks and rooms that are out of alignment, giving new life even to the darkest and most dismal room, using unique colour combinations. For at least 600 years, the terrazzo craftsmen from the North-Eastern Italian regions, rich in imagination and poor in pocket, have walked the roads of Europe from Paris to St. Petersburg, armed with colourful stones from their native quarries (the so-called “claps” or pebbles), the only resource that was abundant in a land that was difficult to farm, and on their knees combined the use of their own, home-made working tools to create and mould their works.
Giobatta Crovato was one of the founders of the very poor Guild of Terrazzo-layers, founded in 1582, which had its headquarters and an altar dedicated to its patron saint, San Floriano, in Venice, in the abandoned church of Saint Paternian.
Not all terrazzo-layers were as fortunate as Giandomenico Facchina, from Sequals, buried in Paris at Père Lachaise, cemetery of the artists, because he had created some of the most beautiful works of art , working side by side with the famous architect Charles Garnier. This book is dedicated to them, to those anonymous craftsmen, so that a written and visual testimony will remain of an ancient craft that was humble and tiring, evocative and creative.

  
Some tools used for making the Venetian Terrazzo
square trowel
wooden stone-breaker
iron hammer
knee-pad
The Venetain Terrazzo or battutto (beaten) floor was attributed this name because it was in the lagoon city of Venice that it reached its maximum development and splendour. Its origins date right back to the early times of floor decoration in Ancient Greece, where floors composed of river pebbles were arranged and cemented with lime mortar or clay. Later on, this type of flooring, which was somewhat basic, was replaced – especially in Roman times – by various flooring techniques including the one that is of interest to us, i.e. the opus signinum, which seems to have also gone by name of pavement barbaricum.
 
In Italy, the opus signinum was made by mixing broken tiles with lime mortar: the mixture took on a pinkish colour, which is why it was also called pavimentum testaceum. If the mixture also included marble chips, it was called opus segmentatum. Examples of this latter type of floor, dating back to the first century AD, can be found on the lowest floor level between the basilica and the church tower in Aquileia.
Though it has been much admired, this type of flooring has never been the object of any specific and detailed research, possibly because the topic might seem to be simple and unpretentious, or maybe because it was considered as one of the lesser arts in the building world. To install a terrazzo floor is a craft whose origins date back to the Ancient Roman mosaic school, handed down almost inexplicably over the centuries by the Friuli people, since it was in their little community that terrazzo floors have always had a place among the local country practices.

The earliest illustration of the making of a terrazzo floor is found in Della Architettura by Giovanni Antonio Rusconi, in which the wood engravings date back to the mid-sixteenth century, though the year of publication was only 1590, after the author’s death, when the editor published the book with a brief written comment. This treatise is along the same lines as Barbaro’s, but there is an important difference in the proportions of lime mortar to opus signinum, which is one to three (instead of 2) for new floors and five to two for old floors. By the end of the 16th century, when the Guild of Terrazzo-layers was granted its statue, the techniques had become well established, though they varied considerably, and had come to form an integral part of the architectural heritage and of the printed documents of the period.