by Sally Gable
In retrospect I see that Elaine and Tom must have felt as frustrated by their visit to the Veneto as we were. The pleasure of the Venice experience grows in direct proportion to what the visitor brings with him. For a person with an openness to exotic, overwrought beauty, to romance, to magic ripples and shadows, to pervasive history, Venice is a sensual workout. But for a person who sees Venice as an early-day Disneyland of picture-book splendor, Venice might seem opaque and unrewarding after the novelty of streets filled with water has worn off.
32
Cornaro Meets Cornaro
“How about this, Carl?” Christoph Cornaro is in our grand salon in front of the statue of Giorgio Cornaro, who built the villa. Christoph is contorting his body to imitate Giorgio's artful but unlikely pose. He has his left hand on his hip, with his right hand extended like the statue behind him. Christoph is frustrated because he does not have a military helmet available to place beneath his left foot. Finally, he settles for shifting his weight to his right leg and bending his left knee.
“Not a bad likeness, would you say?” Christoph says to Carl, who stands ten feet away directing Christoph's gestures and photographing him.
“You should have brought your suit of armor,” Carl chides. “I'm surprised an ambassador would leave home without his armor.”
“I'm on holiday,” Christoph protests softly.
I'm standing behind Carl, laughing at the silliness. Christoph Cornaro, I decide, is a dead ringer for Camillo Mariani's statue of Giorgio Cornaro. Both have the same high forehead, deep-set eyes, long straight nose, and small mouth; even their earlobes are alike. Their builds are identical as well, although the sculptor has super-sized Giorgio like an order at McDonald's so as to fill one of the six eight-foot-high niches that line the walls of the grand salon. Apart from the fact that Giorgio is in armor while Christoph wears the neat suit of a senior diplomat, I note only one difference between the two Cornaros who are so distant in time: Giorgio sports a full head of wavy hair and a lush beard that falls to his breastplate. Christoph is bald on top and clean-shaven.
One winter morning in Atlanta I spotted the name of Christoph Cornaro in a New York Times article that mentioned a concert he hosted at the Austrian embassy in New Delhi. Carl wrote to Ambassador Cornaro, explained our new connection with the Cornaro family, and inquired whether the ambassador was related to the Cornaros of Venice. Christoph sent a warm reply confirming that he is indeed a relative. Further correspondence and a few phone calls led us to invite him and his American-born wife Gail to visit us at Piombino Dese the following spring.
By the time of his visit Christoph is Austria's ambassador to the Vatican. The appointment, intended as his last assignment before retirement, is particularly appropriate for a Cornaro; the Cornaro family supplied a total of nine cardinals between 1500 and 1789. The pope himself once referred to that history during the course of a meeting with Christoph.
Carl picks up the Cornaros at the Padua train station. They have barely climbed out of the car at Piombino Dese before Carl immerses Christoph in Cornaro genealogical material; from then on the two share hours of family sleuthing. Christoph's branch of the Cornaro family was living at Bergamo, a Venetian-controlled town northwest of Venice, when Napoleon's French army—in the course of fighting the Austrians in 1797—made a brief detour to seize Venice and its mainland territory. Curiously, later warfare and diplomatic maneuvering led France to cede Venice and the Veneto to Austria. Christoph's ancestors became Austrian citizens and prominent military leaders, one of them a field marshal of the Austrian army. The Cornaros of Venice had numerous relatives residing in Bergamo when Napoleon's army arrived, but Christoph's family is unable to establish its own precise connection, because both the public and private records of his family were destroyed before anyone made an effort to sort it out.
Gail is as congenial as Christoph. We chatter like long-lost cousins, swimming in currents of children, Italy, and expatriate life. Our evenings with the Cornaros, sitting in the Tower of Babel room, talking, listening to a CD of Schoenberg and Korngold, remind me of my childhood, although my childhood home in New Hampshire was distinctly non-Palladian and my father would have tolerated nothing as modern as Schoenberg or Korngold. Christoph and Gail tell us of their experiences in Iran, where Christoph served as Austria's ambassador while the Iranians were holding our American embassy staff hostage.
On the second day of the Cornaros’ visit Carl leads us on a cross-country adventure in search of other, more obscure Cornaro villas that he has identified. Our first stop is Villa Corner-Chiminelli, built by another branch of the Cornaro family about twenty-five years after our Villa Cornaro. Villa Corner-Chiminelli lies in the small town of Sant’ Andrea oltre il Muson just west of Castelfranco. Its faded street-side exterior would never be noticed by a casual passerby. A phone call ahead, however, gets us admission to the remarkable garden at the rear overlooking acres of tilled farmland. The garden is especially interesting to Carl and me because of the way its trees and overgrown shrubs are laid out in a simple crossing of two pathways at right angles. It is the same layout we've seen in a 1613 watercolor of our Villa Cornaro in the archives of the Museo Correr in Venice. The trees in the garden at Villa Corner-Chiminelli—perhaps four hundred years old—have grown huge now. Their size shrinks the garden, but they suggest the way our own park would look today if it had been left untouched from Palladio's time.
For Christoph and Gail, on the other hand, the interior of Corner-Chiminelli has more appeal than the garden. Frescos, often attributed to Paolo Veronese's brother Benedetto Caliari, light the grand salon with color, even though several frescos were stolen from the villa earlier in the century. (How do you steal a fresco? Remove a section of the wall!) Two immense clear-glass Murano chandeliers are even more impressive than the remaining frescos. The clear cristallo is a good indicator of eighteenth-century origins.
In Atlanta, Carl seldom lets me throw anything away, no matter how overcrowded our closets. It must be a problem common to all villa owners as well, because so many of them have gathered the detritus of past centuries into a shed grandiloquently labeled “Agriculture Museum” or “Carriage Museum.” Sometimes the accumulation appears to reflect a hobby of the particular owner. At Villa Godi, the Palladio-designed villa at Lonedo, you can find a fossil museum in the cantina. Villa Corner-Chiminelli has another unhappy variant. Because the twentieth-century owners have been shoe manufacturers, a shed beside the villa overflows with primitive early shoemaking equipment. We lose twenty minutes nodding and expressing admiration as the custodian leads us item by item through the shed. We try various ways to express our need to depart, but none of them conveys to the custodian a sufficient sense of urgency. Finally sated with mind-numbing knowledge of early shoemaking and struggling to recall what we learned about the villa itself, we make our way to our Fiat Furnace.
We hope there is time to show our guests still another Villa Cornaro at Romano d'ezzelino, a small town in the shadow of Bas-sano del Grappa that is rapidly becoming a busy suburb of that hilltop city. Alas, we have dallied too long at the Shoe Museum. The villa at Romano d'ezzelino, now home to a private school, is closed for the afternoon riposo. We peer through the gate at the reworked facade of the sixteenth-century villa. Carl reads aloud to us from our guidebook, telling us of the Orangerie that was added to the earlier structure under the supervision of Palladio's follower Vin-cenzo Scamozzi—the same man who designed the barchessa of our villa.
All is not lost. About three hundred yards along the road is an enoteca selling locally produced wine with an attractive Villa Cornaro label. Christoph is delighted; he begins calculating how many bottles he must buy for relatives back in Vienna. Carl and I buy several bottles ourselves and drink one that night after Christoph and Gail depart. We are reminded once again that a good label does not ensure a good wine. I wonder what the Vienna Cornaros will think.
A collateral benefit of having interesting houseguests is that they often reci
procate your invitation. That is how we end up the following year as houseguests of the Austrian ambassador to the Vatican.
Gail spies us in the crowd when we arrive by train at Rome's Termini Station. She expertly wends her way through the throng with us in tow. Car and driver await us at the curb. We enter the car's cool sanctuary with a conviction that we are traveling in a style far above our heads.
Now it is Christoph's turn to be tour guide. Needless to say, the sights he has arranged for us to see outshine the two villas (one of them closed) and Shoe Museum that we organized for the Cornaros in the Veneto. The highlight is an expedition to the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Christoph rather than a chauffeur is at the wheel, but this is no Fiat Furnace. We settle back in air-conditioned comfort. Our objective: the church's Cornaro Chapel, commissioned in 1647 by one of the Cornaro family's cardinals and designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The central figure, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, depicting an angel poised to thrust a golden arrow into Saint Teresa's heart, is often described as Bernini's greatest sculpture and is sometimes cited as the greatest sculpture of the seventeenth century. Saint Teresa described her mystic experience:
Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form…. He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire…. In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one's soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it—even a considerable share.
One problem: The Cornaro Chapel is closed for a lengthy restoration project. The tall chapel is completely enclosed by scaffolds, which are themselves encased in opaque plastic sheets. This presents no obstacle for Christoph, who has arranged for the chief restorer to be present in person to give us a guided tour of the entire chapel and an explanation of the restoration project. Just in case we have questions beyond the scope of the chief restorer, Christoph has also arranged for a representative of the Soprinten-dente di Belle Arti to be on hand as well.
The chief restorer leads us behind the plastic curtains and up a narrow metal stair to the first deck of scaffolding. We pause only for a brief glance at the skirts of Saint Teresa before moving up a second stair. On the next level we first see several workers dabbing at the decorative plaster molding that lines the chapel. They are cautiously removing centuries of grease and grime one square centimeter at a time. Our eyes are then drawn to the luminous glow of Saint Teresa's agonized face rising above the scaffold deck. No one could call it stone; it's nothing but the warmest, most delicate breathing skin. The pain and rapture of her face are not reduced by standing just eighteen inches away instead of peering up from the floor of the chapel two levels below. Bernini has left for posterity an amazing statement of his insight into religion, ecstasy, women, the human body, and stone itself.
To my left, the angel is poised like a pagan Cupid, his arm drawn back to thrust the golden arrow into Saint Teresa's heart. But now the angel's hand is empty. I turn to the chief restorer to say, jokingly, “The arrow's missing! I hope you have it under lock and key.” The chief restorer chuckles with me, but a few minutes later I notice that he is no longer in our small group. Have I hurt his feelings? I wonder. We are continuing our admiring inspection when I hear a rapid pounding as someone hurriedly mounts the metal stairs. The chief restorer pops into view and extends his hand toward me. I suddenly realize that what he is holding casually before me is a golden arrow.
“That's the original arrow, isn't it?” I ask reverently.
“Take it, take it,” he replies.
“Bernini's original arrow?” I ask again. Stunned to see one of the great icons of western art held before me, I am unable to move my hands from my sides.
“Original, yes, take it,” he says again.
“He really wants you to hold it, Sally,” Carl speaks up from over my shoulder, finally overcoming my paralysis. I reach out, as cautiously as I would reach for a snowflake, and take the arrow in two hands. Suddenly I'm afraid that any motion I make may somehow damage the arrow. I envision my name recorded in history beside that of the man who burned the library at Alexandria. Nonetheless, I manage to turn slowly and show it to Carl. I notice that he makes no effort to reach out and hold it himself. Gail and Christoph crowd in to peer at it as well. I'm relieved to return it to the chief restorer, but my hands tingle for hours at the thought of what they held.
Soon we make our way down. As we reach the ground I see skeletons traced in intaglio on the floor of the chapel, leering up at me. I hope I have not offended them.
33
Alone Again
Carl's “sabbatical” comes to an end after twenty months—”My time outside the walls,” he calls it—and he returns to the full-time workforce. Once again I'm by myself in Piombino Dese for long stays each spring and fall, although Carl has now arranged to stretch his visits to one month each season. Carl, of course, points out that he is equally by himself in Atlanta. Note to diary: Why are men so technical?
In the solitude of the villa, loneliness creeps in some evenings, arriving stealthily like the barely perceptible onset of a cold—first a scratchy throat, then a sniffly nose. My mornings disappear in dialogues with workmen, townspeople, Silvana, Bianca, Ilario, and Francesca. The hours of riposo are my own, however; only an American would call me between one and three-thirty in the afternoon. Community returns in late afternoons and early evenings, when I shop, visit nearby towns, or prepare tea on the back porch for friends. Nine o'clock signals Giacomo's arrival to close the villa. The clanking of metal bars and rapid clopping on terra-cotta tiles diminish to a faint rhythm as he works his way through the west wing, the east wing, upstairs. Finally with a shouted “Buona notte, signora Sally!” he tugs the front door shut, shoots the heavy bolt with four chings of the huge key, and is gone. I am left in silence.
Television is not a feasible entertainment choice for me in Italy. The Rushes have left behind an old black-and-white TV, but I can extract nothing but grade-C western movies imported from the States, plus Colpo grosso. Colpo grosso is a sophomoric evocation of the wonders of the unadorned female form; our London friend Judith aptly named it “Boobs and Bums.” Lola Butler has instructed me to watch as much Italian TV as I can bear because, she says, it will accustom me to the rapid patter of Italian speech. But even the news programs are rough slogging. The female announcers are usually sultry sirens with long blond hair and enormous lips; they speak so rapidly you think you're listening to a tobacco auctioneer. Male emcees, by contrast, are older than Adam, wear wigs, and speak so slowly you want to wind them up.
So, after Giacomo leaves, I linger in the kitchen. I've made it my audio center. On the simple CD player that Carl brought over for me, I insert one after another of the CDs I've brought from Atlanta—late Beethoven string quartets, Mozart string quintets, the Lord Nelson Mass, II Trovatore, Samson and Delilah. I start lists of other CDs I need in Italy. My Mac PowerBook records it all. Mostly, though, I write letter after letter to children and friends, describing the villa, Piombino Dese, new friends, recipes, Italian politics.
The older I get, the more I remind myself of my father, from whom I take so many of my habits, some good and some outrageous. My father wrote volumes of letters to his three daughters after we each left home for boarding school at about age thirteen. Was it because he missed us? Was solitude driving him, despite my mother's presence? Were his letters notes for later memoirs? Was he trying to explain himself? Here I am writing letters as furiously as he did, without understanding what has led either of us to do it.
Some evenings I just climb into the “matrimonial bed”—so called by the Italians because its twin frames, springs, and mattresses are topped by a single set of linens—and read into the night. This quickly proves too luxurious and self-indulgent for my New England psyche. I decide that while in Italy I must read books only in Italian and only by Italian authors.
Riccardo brings me three of his Italian workbooks from school and a copy of Natalia Ginzburg's Lessico famigliare (Family Dictionary). This is the book I devour first and love most. Ginzburg's docile mother and irascible father remind me of my own parents, and I am pulled into her Milanese world of the 1920s and 1930s. Her clear, direct, image-filled prose is easy for me to read; her astute observations on human nature are food for my evenings and, sometimes, afternoons alone. (Reading in Italian makes afternoon reading acceptable.) In the small local bookstore I find a volume of Ginzburg's essays and read about her three years in Britain with her husband, a Jew from Turin. He taught at the university there while she cared for their three children and studied the inscrutable British character. She writes—so briefly!—of her husband's death in 1943 at the hands of the Nazis and of her subsequent struggle to establish herself as a writer in Rome so that she could support the children. I weep when I read her brief summary of those few years of marriage.
Ma era quello il tempo migliore della mia vita e solo adesso ehe m'e sfuggito per sempre, solo adesso lo so.
But that was the best time of my life and only now that it has fled forever, only now do I realize that.
My lists of Italian words pop up dappertutto: on the flyleaves of books, inside kitchen cupboards, on the mirror of my vanity upstairs. “Il fratellastro.” What was I reading when I jotted down the word for stepbrother or half-brother? Or “il monello” or “zufolare” or “il citrullo”! Maybe it was Primo Levi's Favole (Fables), or perhaps short stories by Dino Buzzati.