May 2014. With much fear and shyness, I begin my first internship, which would later turn into my first job. A visit to the company, a guided tour through machinery and people who would soon turn out to be colleagues ready to help me on my journey of knowledge.
This was the first approach to a carpentry company that from the first glance is capable of fascination and attention-grabbing.
After a degree in languages, finding oneself between an oak and an elm, a hand planed and a brushed - with all its myriad declinations - a goosefoot and a bullnose, technical drawings that not even Leonardo... It was not an easy thing to do, I asked the same questions a thousand times, but in the end I learned something and above all a curiosity was born in me to understand things, to try, to "put my hands to work."
Until a discovery: a carpentry class just a step away from work!
It will make me want to take my eyes off the PC, to create and work with my hands, to understand how "the guys downstairs" think and work, but also that curiosity that moves the sun and other stars.
For something like a week after the course ended, I went around announcing my arrival and departure with a kind of pluralia majestatis: me and my tray.
It's just a beech tray but beautiful to me: made in almost biblical time but with dovetail joints that match perfectly, made strictly by hand. It is my own little work of art..
Behind this simple tray, there is no small amount of work and study, the result of a few - but fundamental - ingredients:
A MASTER who patiently passes on notions but above all the passion that drives this craft and makes it survive in this hypertechnological world KNOWLEDGE, that which rather than being studied and learned from books, is passed on and handed down, that which is learned by stealing secrets from the old with the eyes, that which is learned by looking at nature, at wood and its knots and flaming, that which is felt with the fingers by caressing a board with its veins and listening to its breath. Because if you know how to look at it and touch it, wood cannot hide even its most secret part.
The WILL to learn and to get involved, to try, to get your hands dirty.
And in the end you understand that carpentry is not an easy job, it is not a job for everyone: it is not only knowing how to use a tape measure, a sharp pencil and machines, but it is precision in marking and cutting-because, when you make a mistake, you often have to start over again; it is knowing and choosing the most suitable wood for each type of work; it is feeling the wood, ennobling it and being aware that it is something alive that will change with us but give satisfaction and joy of having created something unique, that will never be the same. And you also understand that carpentry is an ancient craft, still tied to the mountains, to tradition and also to a spic and span language, that dialect that seems to be the only language that has the right words to indicate any gesture, tool, feeling related to wood and its work.
During those lessons, one is so committed to getting things right, not getting hurt, using the right iron, holding the chisel one way rather than another, that one finds oneself catapulted into a parallel world of unique scents and noises and a master who patiently reveals the secrets of the craft so that the tradition can continue and be handed down.
And so, my tray and I leave the door of the woodworking shop behind but already eagerly waiting for it to open again for the next class.