Lavatoio - Ulassai

Few pieces of municipal plumbing have had a stranger afterlife than this one. Built between 1903 and 1905 so the women of Ulassai could wash wool in running water, the village lavatoio became, eighty years on, a canvas for some of the most respected names in Italian post-war art — and remains the unlikely centrepiece of an open-air museum.

Why it matters

The washhouse is the clearest example of what Ulassai does with its ordinary buildings. The regional tourism portal describes the whole village as a genuine open-air museum, and the lavatoio is one of its key rooms. The granite parallelepiped with its three arched openings still reads as utilitarian architecture: two entrances and a central window on the main facade, cornice jutting above, two rows of basins inside divided by a low wall. Then the reinventions begin. In 1982 Maria Lai, the village's most celebrated artist, hung a ceiling loom of ropes threaded through iron tubes against walls painted black, grey and red. In 1984 Luigi Veronesi set a mosaic of granite, pink and white marble and sea stones — coloured half-moons — on one side; in 1987 Costantino Nivola added a bronze fountain whose flowing water strikes tiles with an almost musical sound; in 1989 Guido Strazza completed the ensemble with a wheat-stalk mosaic fountain and the paving of the small square. A laundry from 1905 thus holds four artistic statements across four decades, all keyed to water.

What to notice

• The building's utilitarian bones: arched openings with granite frames, the projecting cornice, and the double row of basins that tells you exactly what the room was for.
• Maria Lai's ceiling of 1982, ropes interlaced with iron tubes — the same thread vocabulary she used across the village.
• Veronesi's fountain of the spring (1984), its semicircles of marble, granite and sea pebbles, on the side opposite Strazza's fountain of wheat (1989).
• Nivola's 1987 sounding fountain, whose water plays across bronze tiles.
• The washhouse stands within Ulassai's wider landscape of public artworks and mountain scenery.

Context and history

Public washhouses were the hydraulic infrastructure of Italian villages without abundant private water, and Ulassai's was commissioned and built in 1903–1905, at the height of that municipal campaign. Its working life as a laundry — the portal records that women came here to wash wool, a nod to the pastoral economy of the Tacchi — lasted long enough to fix the building in local memory. The artistic turn came from a daughter of the village: Maria Lai (1919–2013), who had made thread and rope her signature material, treated the washhouse as the first of her interventions in Ulassai's public spaces, three years after her celebrated 1981 tying of the mountain. Her example drew the others: Nivola, the Sardinian-born sculptor of American career, in 1987; Veronesi and Strazza in the years around. The museum that consolidates this story, La Stazione dell'Arte, opened in 2006 in the former railway station and keeps the permanent collection formed from Lai's donation of more than 140 works to her hometown — the washhouse is one of several public works that extend Lai's artistic presence across the village.