Palladian Days

by Sally Gable

  Again the bee-man arrives with the same snappy cap and conjures the bees into his box. This time he doesn't bring us any honey.

  Over time we find other ways to tweak the villa for improved functionality. For example, each of the four main doors onto the two large brick stairs is locked by a different key, and the locks cannot be opened from within the stairwell. As a result, we can't lead guests up the large brick stairs—which are much grander than the tight wooden stairs—without one of us first dashing up the wooden stairs in order to unlock the door at the top. After much delay we find a locksmith to install new locks that work with a single key from either side.

  The first-floor bedroom, we discover, is unusable because the adjoining bathroom has no bath. A bidet sits in splendor in the only part of the room big enough for a tub. We trade out the bidet so the bedroom can be used by guests who are unable to climb stairs.

  We solve the telephone problem by switching to wireless phones—an expensive novelty in Italy at the time—so we can carry the handset around the villa with us. An answering machine gives us backup for calls we miss.

  Even the burglar alarm can be improved. We combine the separate upstairs and downstairs systems. We also remove some internal sensors that require our bedroom suite to be isolated at night from the rest of the villa.

  We see all these little projects as part of an effort to liberate the inherent livability of Palladio's villa. Carl is all wet about King Kong.

  36

  The Ultralight

  Early one evening, as we sit on the south portico for our customary prosecco, munching a wedge of Montasio cheese and tangy green olives, we hear a drone overhead, approaching from a distance. The sound grows to a loud racket, as if a flying lawn mower were about to land on top of us. Then, barely skimming above the tips of our tall Lombardy poplars, an ultralight flashes into view. We are so startled to find such madness in Italy that we almost miss the pilot's friendly wave of his hand as the plane banks and swings away, heading toward Loreggia.

  The ultralight reappears two weeks later and again ten days after that. Each time the pilot makes a distinct gesture in our direction before continuing on his low flight across the fields to the south. We are left wondering who our devil-may-care friend can be, confident that we have never personally met him.

  One day as I walk down Via Roma to the panificio I am hailed by a “Signora, signora” and turn to find a short, jovial man with a broad smile.

  “You are the signora from the villa, yes?” he asks. I confirm that I am.

  “I am Umberto Nepitali,” he says with pride. “I wave at you from my airplane.” We chat for a few minutes and go our ways. In future months Carl and I continue to see him in the air and occasionally on the ground. We exchange waves or a few cordial words. I come to recognize Umberto's wife as well, another garrulous mesomorph, who has round brown eyes and a round smile. She delivers mail around Piombino Dese on her blue-and-white Vespa.

  Returning to Piombino Dese the following spring, I offer my usual “Salve, Umberto! Come statf” as we pass each other near the municipio.

  “Ah, Signora Sally, I feel like dying,” he replies, to my alarm. “If I didn't have a sixteen-year-old son, I would kill myself.”

  Umberto tells me his wife was crushed under a truck while making her mail deliveries during the winter.

  Later Silvana tells me that Umberto has sold his ultralight.

  Carl and I stop by Luigina's pasticceria on our way home from the post office. Today is Monday, the Miolos’ Caffe Palladio is closed, and we need the caloric rush of a cappuccino and brioche. As we are paying to leave, an attractive woman is ordering a tray of pastries to take out. She is accompanied by a beautiful little girl with huge dark eyes, pale skin, and curly dark-chocolate hair in ponytails secured by ribbons pulled up high above her ears.

  “Ah, ehe bella!” I exclaim. “Quanti anni ha? How old is she?”

  “Diciotto mesi. Eighteen months,” the woman responds with a smile. “She's my daughter's child. I keep her every day.”

  “How fortunate you are to have your granddaughter so close!”

  “Si,” she agrees. She hesitates briefly, then finally volunteers, “My daughter is not married. She is not yet nineteen—too young to be married—and must complete school first. She and her fidanzato will marry when they finish.”

  She pauses. The little girl laughs up at me, then grabs her grandmother's legs.

  “My daughter cried a lot at first, my husband and I cried a lot,” the grandmother continues. “But then when our daughter went to the hospital and she was born”—looking down at the smiling child—”we were so happy! We are so happy. Our daughter will finish school and then be able to marry and raise her daughter.”

  She gathers up her package of pastries and, her granddaughter in her arms, bids us “Buona giornata,” and heads for her car in the piazza opposite.

  Our Venetan friends wear their emotions like clothes. Joy, grief, anguish are paraded before everyone in a way vastly different from my American experience. We Americans share our joys easily, but consider it a strength to contain our grief. We praise a widow or widower for “composure” at the funeral of a spouse. If we have conflicting feelings about the birth of a grandchild out of wedlock, we do not share them with a total stranger at a pastry shop. We would not declare thoughts of suicide to a casual acquaintance on the sidewalk. Venetans find in the visible display of strong emotions both a demonstration of character and a therapy. Emotions are stylized; grand gesture or dramatic expression is required to convey adequately one's humanity. If a friend's mother has died recently, the friend will delineate in exact detail the depth and breadth of her sorrow, and she will expect you to inquire of her feeling of loss for several months so she can render another chorus of her grief. This ritual clearly benefits those who mourn, allowing them to talk about the deceased, to reminisce, weep, and extol the virtues of their beloved. It acknowledges an acceptance of the totality of life, the understanding that bad things happen to everyone and that you must express your loss or confusion so it can be left behind.

  37

  Lives

  Andrea Palladio is a constant presence in my thoughts when I am at Villa Cornaro. I wonder how he would like the flowers I've just placed on the dining-room table. Would he approve of the furnishings we have? I know he'd like our kitchen! And I believe he would be profoundly satisfied to see how flexible and adaptable his creation has been through the centuries for a succession of families with different needs and lifestyles.

  Carl and I rented Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries one evening last month in Atlanta. The film was obliquely interesting but inscrutable when I first saw it years ago while still in college. I was prompted to watch it again because it came up in a conversation with our college classmate Nina and her husband Frank, who recently stayed with us at the villa. Carl and Frank were discussing Erik Erikson's pioneering work Childhood and Society, in which Erikson posits that a person typically passes through seven “crises” in life, including an “identity crisis” in one's late teens or early twenties and an “integrity crisis” toward the end of one's career. As an undergraduate Carl took a course Erikson taught. At the point for discussing the integrity crisis, Erikson canceled his lecture and told the class to report to the Brattle, a local theater, for a private showing of Wild Strawberries. Erikson said the film conveyed all the class needed to know about the integrity crisis.

  The story follows an elderly retired professor of medicine through the day on which he receives a prestigious honorary doctorate from his university. He revisits in his mind key episodes in his personal and professional past and rethinks his life decisions in an effort to assess his own worthiness. With Erikson's analysis as context, the film upon re-viewing is not inscrutable at all.

  I wonder if Palladio ever had an integrity crisis. He was sixty-two years old when he published his Four Books in 1570. Was it, I speculate with Carl, the product of an integrity crisis? Carl says no;
he believes Four Books was part of Palladio's recurring campaign to be appointed proto or chief architect of Venice, a goal that always eluded him.

  Any integrity crisis Palladio might have had would quickly pass if he were to see the vibrant life of his Villa Cornaro today, some 450 years after he created it. Perhaps he would come on the day the svantaggi visit. Once a year, on a Sunday afternoon in May, the park of the villa fills with fifty or so young adults at play, kicking soccer balls, circling about in games. A casual observer at first might not notice anything awry. Then he would wonder about so many balls veering at obtuse angles into the lake bed, errant kicks crushing the begonias that circle the fountain. At last he would spot several young women sitting immobile and blank-faced in folding chairs placed in the shade of the poplars. He would realize that more than half of the participants are mentally or physically handicapped. The others are members of a local volunteer association of young adults who gather the handicapped of the area for an outing every two weeks.

  During their visit one year, as I watch the event from the south portico of the villa, Marina Bighin walks up the steps to join me. Marina is the parrucchiera (hairdresser) whose shop is in the former barchessa of the villa, with her family's apartment to the rear and above. As an occasional customer, I carry memories of Marina at work in her busy shop, chattering, laughing, translating into Italian for me when there has been some choice comment in Venetan that she thinks I should hear, her own neck-length, neon-bright auburn hair swinging all the while with her rapid movements.

  Her face is somber now as she sits beside me to study the crowd at play in the park.

  “My life hasn't turned out the way I thought it would,” she says. Her twenty-year-old younger son Giovanni stands beside us, performing intricate repetitive motions with his large hands, as if playing an invisible oboe. Giovanni is autistic. Like most handicapped people in Italy, even the severely handicapped, he lives at home with his family.

  For many years Marina's mother provided much of Giovanni's care. Since her mother's death, Marina, her husband, Roberto, and their older son, Francesco, are left to manage Giovanni on their own. Marina and Roberto cherish the hope that Giovanni's condition can be treated and that he will recover to assume an independent life. They scour the Internet for news of new treatments and, for now, are optimistic about an herbal/vitamin program from the United States.

  Roberto teaches history in a nearby school; Francesco began his photographic career by winning a national competition, and now he photographs art objects for the province of Padua; Marina operates her shop with two employees. Before her mother died, Marina and Roberto would dash off to classical music concerts as far away as Vicenza and Venice, often inviting me to accompany them. They would attend and critique for me every art show in the Veneto. Roberto, a good oil portraitist himself, was a regular participant in local exhibitions. Marina's dinner parties were grand displays of cooking skills and artistic presentation.

  Their lives are quieter now. One or the other of them must stay home evenings unless Francesco can take their place, and Francesco must plan his life in anticipation of assuming Giovanni's care when his parents can no longer cope with it. For now, Marina and Roberto have postponed plans to visit us in Atlanta. They must wait until Giovanni is better, they say, and can get along without them.

  38

  The Impresario

  Four workers hammer the final nails into a thirty-foot-wide wooden stage constructed over the lower portion of the villa's south steps. Their tools bang a crazy arrhythmic melody in the midday heat. Other workers align three hundred plastic chairs in rows across our park. Tomorrow night the renowned Solisti Veneti are scheduled to play a Vivaldi concert as part of a summer series sponsored by the province of Padova.

  “Un gocciolo di vino, signora?” one of the workers shouts when he sees me observing from the portico. An English shout follows: “A tipple of wine you like?”

  These same workers appear once, twice, or more each year to build and then dismantle a palco—as they call the stage platform— and deploy the chairs. I am honored they ask me to share their wine.

  Once or twice a year—sometimes three or four times—we are asked by the comune of Piombino Dese or the province of Padua to allow the presentation of some musical or theatrical event in the park. We always agree, subject to a few ground rules designed to protect the villa. For example, we do not allow trucks carrying electronic or stage gear to drive onto the grass, and we insist that a special electric feed be connected for the lighting instead of risking a major overload to the villa's electric circuits. For choral works the performers simply stand on the south steps of the villa, but most events require construction of a temporary palco to give a flat performing surface.

  Weather is always a risk. There seems to be a variation of Murphy's Law at work: scheduling an outdoor performance at the villa can bring rain in the midst of the deepest drought. The “Sawdust-Pile Effect,” Carl calls it. Fifty years ago an uncle of his in Mississippi owned some land that had once been the site of a sawmill. A large sawdust pile had been left behind. Carl's uncle tried to burn it but found that whenever he lit the pile, the sky would cloud over and rain would extinguish the fire. He abandoned his efforts to eliminate the sawdust, but during dry periods he would still light the pile because of the certainty that it would bring rain.

  Saturday morning arrives dark and overcast. Light showers drift through the park intermittently all day until about five. Then the clouds dissipate to reveal a brilliantly striated orange-red sunset.

  Claudio Scimone, the tall, elegant director of Solisti Veneti, arrives to assess his options. On the one hand, the rain is gone for good. On the other, the felt carpet on the stage is soaked and humidity hangs heavy in the air. Don Aldo has agreed that the concert can be held in the church sanctuary if necessary. Maestro Scimone, however, knows that many in the audience will have been attracted to the concert because of the setting in the villa's park. Ever the professional, he decides to proceed with the concert outdoors as planned. The attendance is SRO; the music is glorious. Sci-mone knows how to deal with the weather: he pauses between movements to allow his string players to retune their instruments.

  An orchestral concert on the south portico steps

  James Galway is performing in the grand salon of Villa Emo, the Palladian villa in nearby Fanzolo di Vedelago. More than a hundred folding chairs crowd the room. The Irish flutist, adorned with flaming red tie and cummerbund, stands and sways like a happy tropical bird. Sweet notes from his silver instrument, amplified by the terrazzo floor, suffuse the room and seduce our ears. The walls of the room are frescoed with immense figures of pagan gods and goddesses who leer down disdainfully from their trompe l'oeil ledges, indignant at the invasion of their quiet evening solitude.

  Carl and I attend the concert as guests of the Asolo Music Festival, its sponsor. The fall of the Berlin Wall has inspired the festival management to make ambitious plans for a Russian music program for the coming summer, including performances by the legendary Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter and Moscow's Shostakovich Quartet. Richter will play in the eighteenth-century Teatro Accademico at Castelfranco. The Shostakovich Quartet, if Carl and I agree, will perform in the grand salon of Villa Cornaro. Our invitation to the Galway concert is intended to convince us that an indoor concert will not damage our villa.

  Galway's recital reminds me why I love chamber music more than any other musical form. The intimacy of the setting creates a union with the strangers around me as we experience the exquisite sounds together. I'm ready to sign on for the Shostakovich Quartet, but Carl is more cautious. He points out that the floor of the grand salon at Villa Emo is a replacement done in terrazzo, while our floor is the original terra-cotta tile—vastly more fragile. There is already evidence of damage to our tile in several spots, vestiges of a piano recital held there shortly before we acquired the villa.

  The principal danger, of course, will come from the feet of the audience's chai
rs. We finally consent to the concert after agreement on two safeguards: the tile floor must be protected with not one but two layers of carpet, and the quartet itself must play from a low wooden platform designed to spread the weight over a broader area.

  The following summer the festival staff show all the care they have promised. My own secret fear that the carpet will deaden the sound of the instruments proves entirely unfounded. The acoustics are perfect; without the carpet the sound might have been too bright. The grand salon and the entrance hall accommodate 165 chairs, but the crowd overflows onto the south and north porticos. The performance itself—an all-Prokofiev program—is one of the great musical experiences of my life, heightened by pride that these masterful musicians are playing in my own home. Emperor loseph II must have felt that way when Mozart played.

  I have become an impresario myself.

  During a trip back to Cambridge for a meeting of the Radcliffe College board of trustees, I am approached by a representative of the Radcliffe Choral Society. The RCS is planning a European tour for next summer and is searching for some reason to extend its trip into Italy. Can I arrange a performance for the group in Piombino Dese? All they need is a place to perform—plus room and board for two days and nights for fifty people!

  “Piombino doesn't even have a hotel,” I start to protest. “You can't stay in people's homes, because no one speaks English.”

  Then I stop to think. What a great cultural event this would be for both Piombino Dese and the RCS—and a great musical experience as well! Many of my happiest moments as an undergraduate were spent singing with the RCS, so I agree to contact the comune of Piombino Dese and its Pro Loco, the civic group that sponsors musical events in town.

  As soon as I return to Piombino Dese I search out Sergio For-mentin, president of Pro Loco. Sergio is Ernesto Formentin's younger son. A foot taller than his father, Sergio has bright red hair and a cheerful, positive manner. I explain the “opportunity.”