Charles Williams and I have resumed our conversation in the Bookidis-Bouzaki store – apotheki – that he designed and had built on the edge of ancient Corinth. It lies not far from the theatre, on a sleepy little road surrounded by fields full of spring flowers. He named the store after his lifelong friend and Corinth archaeologist, Nancy Bookidis, and the conservator who painstakingly worked on the fresco fragments found during the theatre excavations, Stella Bouzaki. Behind a curtain of bougainvillea, you enter a laboratory that at its far end has space for coffee-making. Beyond this are half-a-dozen smaller rooms, each now being used by Corinth’s Roman Painting Project. The main building, however, is a 50m-long, high-roofed and well-lit store that terminates in a long, open workspace. Either side of the central thoroughfare are shelves reaching up to the roof, stacked with, at first, wooden crates of frescoes and then the tons of pottery from the excavations, many being complete vessels.
Roberto Nardi’s team from the Centro di Conservazione at Rome are working in every part of the apotheki. Their very presence brings a gleam to Charles’ eyes. In the small rooms, they are focused on details that are then fed into the ever-extending wall panels occupying the thoroughfare of the store and standing as high as the roof. At the far terminus of the building, a line of panels encloses the space, bringing to mind the original décor of the major rooms around the great Roman theatre.
Visiting these workspaces in the midst of this project would be any archaeologist’s joy. Room after room is filled with jigsaw puzzles of different sizes, all accompanied by the gridded plans from the original excavations made more than 40 years ago. The intricate work with thumbnail-size fragments in one room calls for extraordinary patience. The remaking of the paintings is first sketched out by Andreina Nardi, Roberto’s wife. Her presence with decades of experience visibly charms Charles. One cannot pass by without leafing through her notebooks. They are works of art. Then, following Roberto, we stare at the reconstructed panels. It has taken three years with a team of a dozen or more conservators working full time to get this far. Charles points to a painted colonnade, then to an unfinished panel of overlapping crescents. After this, we reach a line of panels with a niche framed by garlanded bouquets, before his eyes fall lovingly on Aphrodite. She has been brought back to life, not with the richly modelled torso of a Knidian matron. Instead, the goddess has a watercolourist’s mien, finely evoked in fresh paint on a parchment background. To say she is mesmerising is understatement. The presence of her cult allows Charles to reinterpret the rooms around the theatre. With a smile, he admits that he had not expected anything like this. From the crates containing hundreds of thousands of fragments, a Roman past has been resurrected that could not be imagined from the bare walls uncovered in his excavations. Roberto’s team have worked miracles.
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