The Art of Small Repairs
The shutter on the east side of Villa Verbino has been broken since March. Not this March. The one before.
I have been meaning to fix it.
In that time, I have thought about fixing it on approximately forty separate occasions, which is, by my calculation, forty more times than I have actually fixed it. The gap it leaves is three centimeters wide. I know this because I measured it last August, during a period when I had convinced myself that measuring was a reasonable substitute for doing something.
The cats have begun sleeping directly in the stripe of light it produces each morning. They arrange themselves with a precision that suggests they consider this feature intentional, and designed for them. I have not corrected this impression.
There is a man in Marisòla named Caruso who repairs things, and only God knows what kind of things. His workshop is near the station and smells of oil and a particular kind of patience that cannot be manufactured. On the shelves: chairs waiting, clocks disassembled, and one radio that has been there since at least 1960. I have asked about the radio twice. Both times, Caruso looked at it for a long moment and said only, “It’s coming along.”
Last spring I brought him a pair of old shoes. The sole of the left one had separated from the upper and produced a faint slapping sound with each step — not loud, but loud enough that Peppe u Sardu noticed it from across Piazza delle Erbe and called out an observation that I will not repeat here.
Caruso held the shoe and tilted it in the light. Then he said: “These are good shoes.”
I said yes, even though I disagreed with him.
“People throw away good shoes,” he said. He was not talking to me. He was talking to the shoe. Which is completely normal to do.
He resoled them. When I came to collect them he told me, without looking up, that he had also restitched the heel lining, replaced a small metal eyelet that was beginning to corrode, and conditioned the leather. None of this was discussed or agreed upon in advance. I did not raise the matter. The shoes are now, objectively, better than they were when I bought them, which raises questions about the original manufacturer that I have chosen not to pursue.
We replace things because we say we have no time to repair them. This is probably true. It is also, I suspect, not entirely the point.
A new shoe knows nothing about you. It has no memory of the particular way you walk, the route you have taken every morning for eleven years, the slight unevenness of the cobblestones outside Bar del Corso. A resoled shoe has been there. It has formed views and made history.
There is a Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold — making the damage visible, even beautiful. I have always found this idea slightly excessive in its optimism, but I understand the instinct behind it. The repaired thing is not pretending. It has been broken and it knows it. Just like many of us.
I fixed the shutter last Tuesday (hurray for me). It took forty minutes, and I have been thinking about it for over a year. A piece of wood the size of my thumb and a screw I found in a bowl in the kitchen that has been collecting unidentified hardware since 2021. Hardware you don’t know anything about, but it’s always good to have.
The cats are furious. Or what passes for furious in cats, which is mostly indistinguishable from how they always look, but with slightly more intention. They sat in the place where the stripe of light used to fall and stared at the wall for some time, as if waiting for it to reconsider. Confused and angry, they went to sleep in the neighbour’s house.
I met Caruso the other day, and told him that I had managed it by myself. He nodded and said, “Bene, bene. Now you know things can be fixed.”
Then, after a long pause, he said: “The radio is almost done.”
And I thought, miracles do happen, even in Marisòla.
Osalio Verbino
Marisòla, summer 2026
Osalio Verbino — Appunti da Marisòla, Track 10: Nothing Urgent Here
Music: AI-generated with Suno Pro 2026