Essentials
Click on this LINK for practical info about how to get to the village, how and where to park, and how to get to the house. Use the menu on the left side for detailed descriptions.
Address and GPS coordinates: click this Google Maps link.On Maps you will also find many additional images. Check out the Spheres (made by my "Google-maps" son Xander)! Google has visited our town in August 2016 and has registered it with their Streetview high-resolution camera. It has been added to their Maps website early 2017: an excellent place to get your virtual tour of Bussana Vecchia
See also the Bussana Nuova map for foot path, ATM and restaurants, and the Bussana/Arma Beach map for beach suggestions.
Introduction
Friends who are interested to visit us always ask: "Can you say some more about Bussana Vecchia and about your house?" That usually initiates a story of several hours and frantic looking up of new and old photographs.
To pave the way, this series of pages provide you with detail of the artist house used by English sculptor Joan Armitage-Moore (1909 - 1996) in the late 1960's and 70's.
Joan Moore specialised in steel and enamelled steel and according to my great friend the late sir Colin Sidney WIlmot "had a wicked tongue and a clear vision". She married sculptor Kenneth Armitage (1916 - 2002) in 1940 but lived separate since the mid 1950's. Although Kenneth always had a muse on his side, he and Joan were great friends.
Kenneth dedicated a retrospective to Joan in 1997. Besides the house in Bussana they had a studio in Highgate, London.
Joan Augusta Monro Moore, Swans Kenneth Armitage (Museum Fundatie, Zwolle)
oil on board 1973
Besides a water connection shared with multiple other houses, Joan's house offered no amenities. A sewer system was constructed in the 1970's by the artist community. To pay for these expenses, Joan traded her downstairs gallery with her friend Vanni who has made little use of it in the past fifty years, unfortunately.
Sculpting in Bussana became too cumbersome at an advance age, so Joan put her nephew, and my friend, Mundy in charge of the house and that's how I came to live in this wonderful ruined house since 1981.
First time i visited Bussana was in my childhood, with my parents, in 1968. For many summers, we stayed at the Blue Beach bungalows (at the time managed by the "sympathic" Friesian Bert Terpstra). The nearby hippie village Bussana Vecchia, mostly deserted at the time, was a great place to explore. Bars like the Fraschetta and the Osteria were famous for its lavish parties.
From day one I started dreaming about restoring this house back to its original status, where feasible by using the same rubblestone practices that were used by its builders in the 13th century, but also making sure that modern building safety standards were adhered to, and with addition of several key new elements (bathroom and kitchen) to meet today's needs. This required time, knowledge, and money.
Vintage picture from 1985, where I'm making plans to close the non-existant entrance arched ro85
CasaJoan has seen little change since the 1887 earthquake (and its destruction with dynamite by the Sanremo municipality in the 1950's) until I started serious restoration activities in the late 1990's, with completion around summer 2005. Several key architectural-structural aspects of this house were kindly supported by Master Stonemason Ian Cramb.
Ian Cramb was one the few authorities in the world on medieval construction practices, specifically on rubble-stone construction. Ian restored multiple medieval castles and churches in Scotland and England and supervised the construction of the St. John the Divine church in New York City, the world's largest catholic church. Ian Cramb also became famous for his design and construction of Eric Clapton's rubble-stone castle on the island of Antigua, completed early this century (Eric now rents it out for only $50,000 per week). I am indebted to Ian Cramb for his invaluable advice for this restoration project. Sadly, Ian passed away in July 2013 at the respectable age of 85.
A key problem with many restorations is that they make use of cement mortar which is too strong for rubblestone walls. Hairline cracks will appear within few years letting moisture in that, helped by cold winter weather, will eventually break down the thickest walls. Lime mortar is the way to go for these medieval buildings.
My stairway is one of the most photographed objects in town.The entrance to Casajoan is on left side at the top of the stairs. The entrance door with the little pergola is from my other house, casa Miriam, named after the artist Miriam Haworth. The decorations are done by her daughter Jann Haworth (later known for her design of the Sgt Pepper album for the Beatles).
The structure of CasaJoan enables four adults, with two children or guests, to enjoy the house while maintaining bedroom and bathroom privacy.
News
update June 27, 2025
- In its ultimate wisdom, the town of Taggia (Arma) decided to start restoration early June of the old railway / bicycle bridge in Arma (across the Argentina river) that is part of the 30 km unique bicycle path along the coast and thereby block all cyclists, skaters, and hikers for the coming year (and also without giving directions of what they should do).. After a tsunami of complaints they have decided it will remain open until September (nothing would have been done on the bridge anyhow during summer).
- The city of Sanremo received EC funding to restore the small church in our town. They spent April using helicopters to transport all scaffolding to the church. Installation was complete by early May. The project supposedly lasts 400 days. Nothing has happened since then.These type of projects hopefully makes the township understand that the reconstruction of Bussana Vecchia by us inhabitants wasn't an easy job. Everything had to be carried in by hand. There is a chance that the budget has been reduced already to the point that the actual restoration of the church will have to wait until new (EC) budget is granted.
- I enjoyed a wonderful warm Spring in the house until June 27th. I did some minor repairs and have removed all calcium deposits from the faucets, so they should be OK for another year or so. The high-calcium content in the drinking water is good for the heart, so they say, but it slowly but surely clogs the faucets and toilets. Let me know if you find dripping faucets so I can replace them in August when I return.
- I have partially restructured this website. maintaining both English and Italian took me too much time, so I have kept the English version and added a Google translation script that allows you to translate it into any other language.
- My friend Angelo (Casa degli Archi, make sure to visit) gave me a huge wooden cabinet with lion heads, built for his grandmother in Milan in the early 1900's. I've transferred its lower section into a cabinet for the studio bedroom in 2019, and in 2021 I restructured the upper part into a terrace/lounge bank. Winter may be too harsh for the antique wood so then we will place it under the pergola.
- You may have noticed that the government was going for yet another eviction round. On July 25, 2019, it was fifity years ago that they started their first round. This time, they wanted to turn our town with spontaneous architecture into a Disney-like attraction and sell the houses that we restored to the highest bidder. You can read my response to this ridiculous plan HERE.
Current (2025) status is that these eviction attempts are on hold. A judge ruled in a case in May, 2025 that one of the inhabitants who had to pay a fine, leave the house, and return it in its original (demolished) state has to do none of these strange demands by the Demanio (State Land Property) and can stay. Although jurisprediction works differently in Italy, it will be a solid starting point for other lawsuits. - The government doesn't have funding for BV and the European funding was awarded to another town nearby (who will likely burn this money on administrative staff within a few years before restorations could take place).
- Many of us in Bussana Vecchia thought that the destruction of our houses was caused by the 1887 earthquake. A major mistake. Historian and professor Nilo Calvini researched the town in the 1980's and concluded that a major part was destroyed by the muncipality of Sanremo in the 1950's. I collected a large series of early photographs taken between 1887 and the 1960's. They clearly show that many of the houses in the lower part of town (the "artistic" part) were still in good shape in the 1930's.
I've dedicated a long web page on the work of professor Calvini and made a crude English translation of some of the key chapers in one of his books. You can find it HERE. Some of these photographs are on display in the village, for example in the above mentioned house of Angelo: Casa degli Archi