Palladian Days

by Sally Gable

  But the supermercato is all about efficiency: you enter, select, pay, leave. Missing is the grand social convocation of the weekly market, where 90 percent of the town's citizens spend several hours chatting, gossiping, parading, strutting. I am reminded of the occasional town meetings in my native New Hampshire, but the market is weekly and without any agenda at all. The Piombinesi discuss their aunt's latest operation, their daughter's fidanzato, the cabinet members of the current government, the latest execution of a criminal in America, burrata mozzarella, a good recipe for swordfish. They are well dressed, well coiffed, happy to be alive—and especially happy to be living in Italy.

  Market Day awnings fill Piazzetta Squizzato north of the villa

  So the market days may continue for decades in the future, wholly without economic justification, redundant of more logical and less labor-intensive distribution systems. They exist as a social mechanism, for their charm and their tradition. For Americans, the market is an anachronism, something out of place and time. Our insistent search for the “next new thing” means we find the past irrelevant to our lives. For Italians, the market is not an anachronism. It is a warm, vital part of their lives, old-fashioned but loved for that very reason. The market connects them with their families, their fellow townspeople, and their past. The weekly ceremony brings rhythm, structure, and sense to their lives.

  Perhaps the anachronism lies in America, in neighborhoods seeking to thrive without community and without the past.

  20

  Searching for Context

  In my conversations with Dick Rush, he seems to view Villa Cornaro as an object of art existing alone in space—free from its surroundings, from its history, from the families who built it and cherished it, maintained and changed it for almost half a millennium. Dick is an art expert, which neither Carl nor I will ever be, so that may account for the difference in our feeling about the villa. We decide right away that we will never understand the villa except as a home, lodged in its history and the people who surround it now and did so in its past.

  We are on the road! In our pathetically cramped, hot, underpowered, and overpriced rental car (“This model should be called the Fiat Furnace,” Carl says), we're off to little towns with grand country palaces: to nearby Maser to see Villa Barbaro and to Fan-zolo for Villa Emo; then farther afield for Villa Foscari (known inexplicably as “La Malcontenta”) at Gambarare on the Brenta River near the lagoon of Venice; and, finally, Villa Almerico (“La Rotonda”) on the outskirts of Vicenza, Palladio's adopted hometown. We are trying to arrive at our own conception of where Villa Cornaro sits in this pantheon of Palladian icons. About eighteen Palladio-designed villas still stand in the Veneto, the number depending on how you count a few whose connection with Palladio is doubtful or where changes through the centuries are so great that little of Palladio is left. We decide that Barbaro, Emo, La Malcontenta, and La Rotonda, together with Cornaro, constitute a sort of “Big Five.” They are all large villas designed (except La Rotonda) for wealthy Venetian patrons; they were built substantially the way Palladio designed them; and they have not suffered fundamental changes since. So these are the ones we set off to see first. We are on the lookout for contrasts and similarities to our own villa.

  Our plan almost drowns in a sea of frustration. We begin charging along the back roads of the Venetan countryside with brash assurance, soon slowing to confused bewilderment at the lack of signs on some roads and the cryptic markings on others. Finally we are reduced to the hesitant creep that is recognized worldwide as the desperate mark of the hopelessly lost. We avoid blaming each other for being lost only because there are so many other targets conveniently at hand. We begin with the roads themselves and move on to the maps we are using, the dearth of numbered routes, the Italian system of marking roads with signs that simply point randomly to nearby or distant cities (“They must teach geography in driving school,” Carl grumbles), and drivers who object noisily to our stopping in the middle of an intersection to compare the directional markers with the array of towns on our map. Gradually we derive some lessons. Most useful is the realization that a large sign pointing to the right and reading, for example, “Vicenza” does not mean that the next right turn takes you to Vicenza. Only a tourist would have such a misconception, as we learned on one occasion when—Vicenza-bound—we found ourselves sitting in the midst of a rail yard surrounded by locomotives and tank cars. Such a sign actually means that somewhere in the next half mile, among the several roads to the right, is one leading to Vicenza.

  Map of five major Palladian villas fanned across the Venetan plain west of Venice

  “A learning experience,” we assure each other, secretly happy to be in Italy on a sunny day with a pleasant mission and no fixed schedule for achieving it.

  Slowly but inexorably we find all four of the villas we are seeking. The route to Villa Emo at Fanzolo seems especially circuitous, with left turns and right turns on narrow country lanes crisscrossing through miles of fields planted in corn, grain, potatoes, and beans. Only several years and a dozen visits later do we learn that there are at least two other easy, direct routes to Villa Emo. The fact that four of the five villas were built for the nobility of Venice itself—rather than for the provincial nobles of Vicenza who supported Palladio's early career—is not coincidental. (La Rotonda was built by a wealthy churchman of Vicenza, newly returned from Rome, not as a villa but as an entertainment palace in the suburban countryside.) The Venetians did not merely have bigger resources and bigger ambitions; they may have been more desperate as well. The Ottoman Turks were methodically cutting off all of Venice's contacts with the eastern Mediterranean, where the Venetian families had made their fortunes in trade and, in a few cases like the Cornaro family, in vast plantations. The Venetian families were trying to find a new harbor in which to anchor their fortunes. Plantations on the mainland—each centered on a villa—seemed like their best bet, especially because the countryside had been relatively peaceful for thirty-five years or more since Venice's disastrous War of the League of Cambrai and because of the discovery of corn in the New World. The yield from corn was six to seven times greater than the yields obtained from earlier grain crops such as millet. With so much of the families’ assets newly committed to the big new plantations on the mainland, the owners found it prudent to be present on site from the planting each spring through to harvesttime, sometimes with a side trip to the Dolomites in midsummer. That process of coming out from Venice each spring and returning in the fall is what gave rise to the villa—country palace—phenomenon in the sixteenth century. The prosperous Venetians wanted something of the elegance of their Venetian palaces but with less expense.

  Some of the prominent Venetian architects had tried their hand at it before Palladio. One of the earliest results was Villa Giustinian at Roncade, designed in the early 1500s by Pietro Lombardo, still in the Gothic spirit with a floor plan reminiscent of the palaces in Venice. Jacopo Sansovino, Venice's leading architect in the second quarter of the 1500s, weighed in with Villa Garzoni at Pontecasale, and Michele Sanmicheli designed the first Cornaro villa at Piom-bino, the one that bedeviled Palladio when he began designing our own Villa Cornaro twelve years later. In other words, as Palladio moved into the thirty-year period when he would create his Big Five, he was burdened by relatively few precedents. He did not have to displace some earlier, widely accepted style for villas in order to establish his own paradigm, the look and principles that became known as Palladianism.

  Villa Barbaro and Villa Emo both demonstrate one of Palladio's favorite looks. He starts with the family's residence as a tall block in the center. Then he attaches long, low barchesse symmetrically to the left and right. The barchesse are faced with repeated arches, forming a loggia. La Malcontenta was designed in this same manner, although the barchesse were never built. At Barbaro and Emo, Palladio added one more effect: at the far end of each barchessa he built a dovecote on top. The overall result is called the “five-part profile” becaus
e of the five different segments of roofline that it produces: the two dovecotes and two barchesse with the residential core in the middle. Palladio's symmetrical five-part profile is one of the most influential and ubiquitous designs in all of architecture. For Americans, the Capitol in Washington, D.C., is the best example. The domed center of the Capitol is analogous to the residential core at Barbaro and Maser, the Senate and the House of Representatives are the dovecotes, and the connecting segments are the barchesse. At the other end of the grandeur scale, almost every residential area has at least one house with a five-part profile. Usually a garage at one end stands in place of a dovecote, sometimes connected by a breezeway that recalls a barchessa.

  La Malcontenta's most influential feature arose from its site, just as the double projecting portico did at Villa Cornaro. La Mal-contenta sits on the banks of the Brenta River. The frequent floods of the Brenta required Palladio to raise the villa's piano nobile (principal floor) high above the floodplain. To disguise the length of the stair needed in order to reach the piano nobile, he placed it beside the projecting front portico—instead of leaving it in front— and divided the stair into two flights at right angles to each other. Because Palladio could never abide anything that was not symmetrical, he placed a matching stair on the opposite side. The result is one of the emblematic motifs of later Georgian architecture.

  The principal architectural heritage of hilltop La Rotonda, of course, springs from its great dome surrounded by identical porticos on all four facades. Itself inspired by the second-century Pantheon in Rome, La Rotonda can be seen as a major source for every later building constructed with a dome over classical columns.

  Why stop with a Big Five? Why not a Big Seven? Villa Poiana and Villa Badoer also have influential motifs. Maybe the only rational stopping point is a Big Eighteen.

  21

  Unexplored Boxes

  In an early conversation, Doug Lewis mentioned that the archives of the Museo Correr in Venice hold hundreds and hundreds of boxes of original Cornaro family documents relating to the family's properties in Piombino Dese and elsewhere on the mainland. Those documents were the principal source for the manuscript Doug wrote about the villa twenty-five years ago.

  “Did you actually read all those files?” Carl asked.

  “That would take a lifetime,” Doug replied.

  I am haunted by the vision of those unexplored boxes. Uncovering the secrets in each of them becomes an insistent refrain in my mind. Everyday operations of the house are proceeding smoothly: the kitchen functions well, the Miolos take care of tour groups when I'm tied up or not at home, and Ilario tends the garden. The day after Carl departs for Atlanta in late May, I hop the early-morning train for Venice.

  As Edgar Allan Poe suggests in “The Purloined Letter,” sometimes things are best hidden in plain sight. The Museo Correr demonstrates the principle: a gem of Venice hidden in one of its most crowded spots, the Piazza di San Marco. For Carl and me the museum is a favorite destination because it showcases treasures from the long, glittering history of the Venetian Republic: enormous battle flags flown from the prows of triremes during desperate engagements with the Turks, wall-size canvases depicting storied events such as Queen Caterina Cornaro's arrival in Venice for the transfer of Cyprus to the republic in 1489, a pair of seventeenth-century shoes exactly like some drawn on the attic walls of our villa. All this is housed on the second floor of the Procuratie Nuove, the long, low building designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi that runs along the entire south side of the trapezoidal piazza, and of the adjacent building at the west end of the piazza, constructed by the French after Venice's fall to Napoleon's forces in 1797. Tourists who focus on the dramatic attractions at the east end of the piazza—the Basilica, the Campanile, the Loggetta, the Doge's Palace, the Clock Tower—easily overlook the elegant entranceway to the museum, which opens off a passageway in the Napoleonic structure.

  The entrance to the museum's archives and research library is even more obscure. After many requests for directions, I find an arched passage midway along the Procuratie Nuove and cautiously stroll through it into an interior courtyard. A flight of stairs leads me to an elevator, which chugs upward to the card-catalogue room, a cramped, poorly lit space with antiquated metal cabinets. A genial middle-aged man inspects my business card, passport, and driver's license, and grants ad hoc permission to use the library; an official card will be mailed to me in Piombino Dese.

  For one week I peruse the catalogue and order intriguing items from storage. I am soon convinced that—aside from Douglas Lewis or some few foreign scholars like him—only an Italian with fabulous eyesight, great intuitive abilities, and deep knowledge of Venetan and Latin and sixteenth-century Italian will succeed in gleaning the Cornaro family secrets.

  The first problem is the fertility of the Cornaros. There are hundreds of entries under “Corner,” the original Venetan form of the Italian name Cornaro; without a knowledge of the family tree, I'm lost in distinguishing one Giorgio (“Zorzi” in Venetan) from another. There are literally dozens of Giorgios, and equal numbers of Marcos, Giacomos, and Giovannis. Second, the card catalogue often only hints at the nature of the documents described. One typical “Cornaro” card, for instance, reads:

  Fascicolo relative alia gestione dei beni della … a Piombino (Treviso) iyjy-iy6y. cart. Mss. PD C.zoyyll.

  To my untrained eye, this merely indicates unspecified miscellaneous documents about the administration of the estate at Piombino during the thirty years from 1737 to 1767, gathered in a carton numbered 2677.

  Another “Cornaro” card reads:

  Fascicolo relative al patrimonio di… (acquisti, divisioni, permute, vendite, livelli, etc.) 1578—164.8. cart. Mss. PD C.2611/3

  This, I infer, is a bundle of documents relating to acquisitions, territorial divisions, exchanges, sales, and leases of family property over the seventy-year period from 1578 to 1648. The brevity of these descriptions suggests that only the most cursory study of each box's contents was made; any one of the documents might hide something important about the villa during the period when its construction was finally completed. More obstacles block the way. Even if the polyglot of languages and arcane vocabulary is conquered, the early handwriting itself is often indecipherable. Moreover, many items I request cannot be found by the library assistants; they're not “lost,” they simply “cannot be found.” Perhaps they are misfiled, or simply buried out of sight beneath another box. Infinite patience is required as well; the time for hunting a particular cache of documents can sometimes stretch to two hours—which might end with a “cannot be found” report.

  But occasionally true gold sparkles from the page. A young library assistant places before me the original account book of Villa Cornaro from 1553 to 1555—the very pages penned by Giorgio Cornaro and his estate manager during the specific years that the villa was being built. Adrenaline jolts all my limbs when I see it; I can imagine my normally straight hair drawing up in a curly halo. The first two pages seem to list the tenant farmers and employees of the estate, along with a page number for their individual accounts. Subsequent pages begin with a date, then list expenses incurred for the villa on that date, not just construction costs such as lumber and nails, but food costs for the kitchen as well. I struggle to understand the scribbles and only partially succeed:

  I conclude these are expenses incurred for a special dinner (cena) for a most illustrious (Illustrissimo) gentleman from Treviso whose name I cannot read. The expenses are for veal (came di vitello), for a carp (raina) weighing an amount I cannot decipher, for something (flowers? wine? linen?) for the table (tavola), for the hiring of two horses (cavalli) to go to Piombino, for five hens (galline), four of which cost D 40 and one of which cost only D 8. Haver is an archaic form of the modern Italian avere (to have); nolo is a shortened version of noleggiare (to rent); do is the Venetan form of due (two).

  There are numerous entries on other pages for Giorgio's falconers, for dinner guests, for chickens—cl
early a staple of the mid-sixteenth-century diet. Covering just three years, 246 pages speak of the husbandry of the villa's first proprietor. He accounts for every type of expense, just as I try to today; my Quicken computer program would have been a big help to him—and solved the handwriting problem for me as well. Clearly I must study this early record more thoroughly, so I ask the attendant to copy it for me. He promises to do so, but regrets it will take at least a month; he'll mail the copy to me in Atlanta.

  The copy arrives as promised and is now one of my treasures. But when I return to the archives on a later trip and ask to see the original, my request is returned with the notation “cannot be found.” Note to diary: I wonder if they looked around the photocopy machine?

  Since an understanding of the Cornaro genealogy seems to be an essential foundation, I move to a smaller adjoining room lined with books of genealogy and local history. Awaiting me here is Marco Barbaro's massive fifteenth-century compendium Discendenze Patrizie, with eighteenth-century annotations by Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna. This, I later learn, is a fountainhead of Venetian genealogy. One entire volume is devoted to multiple branches of Cornaros, some connected and some not. The data are presented in page after page of charts, with many entries footnoted. There is a mass of information, but not in a form that is easily penetrated. I order a photocopy of this as well, confident that Carl can make sense of it all by plugging the data into the genealogy program he has on his computer. Later, we are able to match disparate Barbaro data on our computer, which provides interesting insights into marriages between different branches of the Cornaro family. While entering the data on his computer, Carl learns from Doug Lewis that there are biographies of many Cornaros in the mammoth, multivolume Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani—almost two hundred pages of them. Carl tracks down a copy of the Dizionario at Emory University in Atlanta and adds excerpts from that information as well.