The first green roof in Trastanello

Click to open gallery

The Summer We Built a Living Roof.

Trastanello, Summer 2016

It was our first summer at Trastanello, and one wing of the old priest house had a collapsed roof — open to the sky, exposed to every rain the Ligurian Apennines could deliver. We knew we needed help, and we knew we wanted to think ambitiously.

We wrote to two institutions: the Department of Architecture at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, and the Faculty of Art at the Technical University of Košice. Five fourth-year students made the journey south — and within the first day of walking the site, they brought us an idea far more interesting than a conventional repair.

They proposed a green walkable roof: a living surface planted with local Ligurian vegetation, structured with small terraces echoing the ancient agricultural hillsides surrounding the village.

The construction follows a careful sequence of layers — wooden roof deck, root barrier, pool foil as waterproof membrane, drainage layer, soil, and finally local plants and stone slabs. Simple materials, precisely ordered.

The work took three weeks. The atmosphere was relaxed and creative — long evenings, good conversations, real physical effort in the Ligurian heat. What carried us through was a straightforward motivation: none of us had ever built a green roof before. The desire to do something for the first time, in a place that deserved that kind of attention, turned out to be more than enough.

By the end, the roof was planted. A small patch of hillside, returned to itself.