THE BUILDING SITE
The building site as first school
The restoration works are the first occasion for training, and the first commission the house carries out, rather than a wait that precedes the activity.
The operations compatible with learning — plasters and stucco, stone, joinery and window frames, floors, dry-stone walls — are carried out by the masters with their apprentices, who take part as members admitted on application. Structural works remain with qualified firms, and the apprentices work alongside them without replacing them.
What the site teaches that a workshop would not
A restoration site imposes a sequence the apprentice cannot choose and that tolerates no second thoughts: first the excavation of the cisterns, then the restoration of the wings; first the removal of the cement plasters, then replastering in lime; first the remaking of the roof covering, then any finish on the floor below. It is the discipline the workshop alone does not transmit, because in the workshop a mistake is discarded and one starts again.
It also imposes scale. Two thousand two hundred square metres of roofing, one thousand two hundred of masonry to consolidate, six thousand of plaster to remove and redo in lime, two thousand five hundred of floors in Iblean stone and terracotta: these are quantities no teaching exercise reproduces, and they teach the apprentice what an hour of his own work is worth.
Admission, and how recruitment is done
Admission is by individual application, with selection on aptitude and commitment and never by category of belonging. The path is in two stages: a paid trial of two to four weeks on the site, then a fixed-term apprenticeship contract, with written start and end, at the end of which the path is completed or continues.
Recruitment is carried out where the young population of the province is to be found, through associations, places of worship and cultural mediators of the agricultural district.
Regular employment as a precondition
Every relationship is framed under the construction industry agreement, with safety training, regular contributions and verification of the right to work in Italy. In a province where the exploitation of agricultural labour is a known and monitored matter, an unimpeachable record on this point is worth more than any economic result, and a single well-founded complaint in this matter would outweigh any result obtained elsewhere.