Palladian Days

by Sally Gable

  Does Luciano Pavarotti sing opera? Within days, Carl has inundated Hugh with background material, copies of Doug Lewis's articles, magazine clippings. Well in advance, we schedule filming for a Friday in June.

  On the preceding Sunday I receive a frantic call from the show's producer. Plans for filming the show's final three-minute summary in the garden at Villa Emo have gone awry because of a conflicting event there. Can they please film it in the garden at Villa Cornaro? On Tuesday?

  We are still at breakfast when the technical crew arrives Tuesday morning. Their first task, to our surprise, is to lay what appears to be a small railroad track across the lawn of the park. Hugh Howard arrives to explain things.

  “We need the track for a camera dolly, so the camera can follow Bob in a long smooth shot as he strolls across the lawn,” he says.

  Bob Vila himself arrives shortly after lunch in the company of his agent and his production assistant. Their goal is to complete filming during riposo, while Piombino Dese is at its quietest. The filming moves slowly. Bob's leisurely three-minute amble across the park, with Villa Cornaro looming majestically in the background, is chopped into small segments of two or three sentences, all repeated in countless retakes punctuated by changes in phrasing, lighting adjustments, and repositioning of the dolly track. In the summary Bob comments on Palladio's innovation, the stages of his development, his importance in western architecture. It's an effective discourse, and I'm convinced that I hear echoes of Carl's Harvard Club speech in it. Vila's delivery is as confident and relaxed on the sixth retake as on the first.

  As the afternoon passes, it becomes clear that the time required has been seriously underestimated. Riposo comes to an end, and the normal noises of a small town return. A lawn mower barks to life in the town playground west of the barchessa. An Italian member of the Vila crew, whose job description apparently focuses on such challenges, is dispatched to reason with the mower operator. Everyone stands about in anticipation. Soon the racket shuts off and the “expediter” returns, followed by the mower operator, who has been invited to watch the filming. In less than ten minutes the cacophony of a jackhammer shatters the air. I remember seeing a work crew setting up on the Viale della Stazione this morning; apparently they are tearing up the asphalt to install a larger drain along the edge of the street. The expediter grimly strides toward the source of the hammering. Again the noise abates after a few minutes; a productive hour ensues. Then from the yard of the church youth center next door to the east arises the tap-tap-tap of a dribbling basketball; everyone turns to the expediter, who sets off again. In a few minutes the crowd of spectators has been augmented by a small group of basketball players. The rest of the work proceeds smoothly to a conclusion, with only minor pauses for airplanes overhead, screeching truck brakes, a barking dog, and a wailing baby. Three final minutes of videotape has consumed four hours.

  We adjourn to the villa for a celebratory prosecco, amid praise for the expediter. He won't tell us his method for preserving the peace with the jackhammer, but I suspect he may have used a four-letter word: lire.

  Looking ahead to Friday, when Bob and his crew will return to film the Villa Cornaro portion of the show, I begin to do some arithmetic in my head. If filming a three-minute segment took four hours, how many hours will it take to film a twelve-minute segment?

  x =(4/3)×12

  x =16 hours

  “Friday will be a long day” I tell Carl as we drift off to sleep.

  Friday brings other worries as well. We awaken to streaming sheets of rain. A low gray sky presses down on Piombino Dese. Will Bob and his crew even bother to show up under these conditions? In fact, everyone arrives exactly as scheduled. The villa will look as beautiful on film as if it had full sun, Bob assures me. The cameraman and lighting crew immediately set to work filming features throughout the villa. Bob and Hugh explain that the basic narrative of the Villa Cornaro segment will center on Carl and me greeting Bob on the south portico and leading him through the grand salon and the dining room, but other shots will be edited in to show particular details and elements from other rooms.

  “We won't use a script,” Bob says. “Just talk with me naturally as though I were a friend visiting your home.” We take a preliminary walk through the villa with Bob and Hugh. Hugh has prepared an outline of subjects he thinks would be of interest, but he and Bob are open to suggestions from Carl and me. We agree that discussion of the graffiti on the portico and the Masonic symbolism of the frescos should be added. We don't rehearse specific questions and answers, however; Bob says we should just listen and respond naturally, as if in a friendly conversation.

  Costumes: I decide to wear a bright sea-green pantsuit; Carl toys with the idea of a suit but settles on slacks and blazer. We join the group downstairs, where Bob's assistant hides a tiny microphone behind my lapel, connected to a wireless sending device hooked inside the waistband of my slacks. Carl is wired in similar fashion.

  The camera begins rolling with Bob alone on the portico. Carl and I join him and are quickly caught up in conversation. Talking with Bob is easy because of his friendly, relaxed, and interested manner—and, of course, he's asking us questions about something we love! The greatest surprise is that we film each of the three scenes in a single uninterrupted take—except the very first scene, where I reflexively begin discussing one of the graffiti in Italian, rather than English. We pause after each scene while Bob, Hugh, and the others closet themselves in a dark room to review the tape carefully and see if a retake is needed; each time they return satisfied. Filming is complete within two hours. There must have been something wrong with that mathematical formula I was using.

  The program does not appear on A&E until almost a year later. Our trepidation mounts throughout the wait. When we finally see the show, we're relieved that there seems little to embarrass us, although I wish I had not so enthusiastically responded “Absolutely!” to four different questions.

  The week after the broadcast, Carl and I are in Concourse E at the Atlanta airport waiting to board for our trip back to Italy. Carl wanders away to the newsstand, but his progress is blocked by a middle-aged man.

  “Didn't I see you on TV last week? On Bob Vila's show?” the man asks.

  Carl hurries back to tell me the story. His grin is bigger than Texas.

  51

  Catastrophe

  We should have read the clues. The signs were there, but we were blind to them.

  For years we have observed a slight dip in the terrazzo floor on the south portico upstairs. We should have it leveled, we say to ourselves, so rainwater won't pool here. Standing water might seep down and damage some of the 450-year-old wooden beams supporting the pavement.

  Two-thirds of the portico floor is covered in original terrazzo veneziano; the balance is patched in an ugly modern-day cement tinted red in an effort to be less obtrusive, but actually managing to suggest heavy rouge on the cheeks of an aging courtesan. The patch was the clue we overlooked. We should have asked ourselves two questions: Why was that patch put there? and Did it resolve the problem? Had we done so, we might have realized that the depression in the floor was merely a symptom of a problem that the cement patch had hidden but hadn't fixed.

  “Sawdust, Sally,” Carl tells me by telephone, anxiety clouding his voice. “Everything under the cement is completely rotten.”

  It is July and ordinarily we would both be in Atlanta. This year Carl, now newly retired, has flown to Venice to represent us at a special concert to be held at the villa. Usually we host concerts only during the spring and fall months when we are living there, but this program is sponsored by a regional organization, and the comune implored us to allow it. (The Miolos insist that we be present for any event, because otherwise their authority to enforce our rules for keeping trucks off the grass, maintaining locked gates, and the like is under constant assault.)

  “Angelo and I opened up that cement patch upstairs. It's a disaster: the underflooring is completely rotted ou
t, and the major beams under that are seriously rotted as well. We're lucky the whole floor hasn't collapsed on us while we're having prosecco on the portico downstairs,” Carl continues.

  Then his tale gets worse. “If the portico collapses, we lose lateral support and the back wall of the villa might go as well.”

  We discuss our next steps. Angelo Marconato, our faithful contractor, will install scaffolding right away to support the upstairs portico. Then he will remove more of the cement patch to see how widespread the problem is. Ernesto Formentin, our geometra, and his son Carlo, an engineer, will work with Angelo in evaluating the extent of the damage. Ernesto and Carlo will prepare an application to the Soprintendente di Belle Arti describing the proposed renovation and requesting approval for the work.

  No one can even guess how much it will all cost.

  Our return to Piombino Dese in the fall to see our ailing villa is joyously delayed for our younger son Jim's marriage to Juli Milnor in late September. Carl and I marvel once again at the good taste and good fortune of our sons in bringing such talented, attractive young wives into our family. Juli visited us at the villa with Jim two years earlier just as an American photographer was taking pictures for an article on Palladian villas in Travel & Leisure magazine. The photographer, upon meeting Juli, quickly decided that she—not Carl, Jim, or I—was the proper person to include in one of the photos.

  The wedding day is glorious, a wonderful occasion made even happier by the presence of two special guests: Leonardo Miolo and his fidanzata Elisa. Leo is unquestionably the handsomest groomsman, while Elisa attracts her own admirers among the men in attendance. Carl and I spring a surprise at the rehearsal dinner the night before: as a memento we give each couple a ceramic tile hand-painted by Marina Rossetto, a wonderful Venetian artisan, with flowers, the names Jim and Juli, and the wedding date. (The tiles are such a success that we ask Marina to prepare some similar ones commemorating Carl and Lisa's wedding five years earlier.) Afterward, Jim and Juli fly off to Costa Rica on their honeymoon, Leonardo and Elisa travel to visit Dick and Julie Rush in Florida and then join Ashley for a brief stay in Los Angeles, and Carl and I board a plane for Italy.

  In the dove-gray light of a late September morning we walk gingerly onto the upstairs south portico. Our beloved villa is masked in impalcatura (scaffolding) like an old lady swathed in bandages. I kneel to touch one of the old beams visible through the expanse where the cement patch has been removed; the wood disintegrates into dust between my fingers. I touch another spot and come away with another handful of powder.

  Removing the cement patch has opened a fascinating window into the structure of the portico floor. Running north-south are twenty-four large structural beams. Atop them are two layers of thick planks, running at right angles to the beams on the upper level and then north-south again on the lower. The terrazzo pavement rests atop the planks. The bottom of the beams and the underside of the first layer of planks are visible from the downstairs portico twenty-four feet below, but it isn't possible to discern any details of their surface from that distance. The ends of the beams—the parts that engage niches in the wall and support the entire floor of the portico—seem to have disintegrated the most. Clearly, we have narrowly avoided a catastrophe.

  Settling on a plan for restoration proves to be more contentious than I would ever have imagined. When a twelve-foot beam is rotten for half its length, it seems elementary to me that it should be replaced. In Italy, we learn, the matter is not so straightforward. Carlo Formentin tells us that if the middle half of the beam is still sound, that half should be retained, with new wood spliced and glued at each end! Angelo Marconato, practical as always, urges replacing the entire skeleton of rotten beams with new ones of specially aged Alpine timber. Carl's position is that we want to make the repair in a way that will last another 450 years. For us, the proper question is, What would Palladio do? The answer seems obvious: He would opt for new beams. Carlo insists that restoration of stubs of the old beams will produce a stable floor while pleasing the officials at the Belle Arti office. He has already had a preliminary meeting with them in Venice; the official to whom the application has been assigned will visit next week for a personal inspection. Our dilemma in the whole debate is this: We assume that the splicing and gluing will last beyond our own lifetime, but we feel a genuine obligation to posterity—an obligation to preserve this villa not just for the next generation or two but to the twenty-fifth century.

  The inspector fails to appear; the press of “other work” prevents her visit, she tells Carlo later. Two subsequent visits are similarly scheduled and canceled.

  So in mid-October, with the interior temperature of the villa falling by the day and forcing us into layers of sweaters, we leave for Atlanta with no work begun. We instruct Carlo and Angelo to proceed with utmost speed to secure permission and go ahead with the restoration. We want them to push for complete replacement of the beams and subflooring, but we are prepared to learn from the recommendations of the Belle Arti staff. Carlo says he will retain consultants to test all of the beams ultrasonically especially the sixteen beams that are still covered by the original terrazzo. Angelo warns that he has no way to replace beams from below; the remaining terrazzo must be removed if the beams beneath it are rotten.

  Through the winter I telephone Carlo Formentin at regular intervals. The news each time is the same: The inspector has not visited. Meanwhile the Miolos teil me with bewilderment that Carlo is taking hundreds of photos of the exposed areas. Carlo assures me he has prepared complete schematics showing how he proposes to resolve the problems. I stay in touch with Angelo as well; his rising impatience and blossoming disgust at the delay are manifest.

  “Let's just go ahead,” he pleads. “We must finish this work. You are paying daily for rental of the impalcatura, which I could be using on other jobs.” Angelo suggests we have Carlo tell the Belle Arti office that we are going to begin emergency repairs on a specified date.

  I stop sleeping well and begin drinking three cups of coffee a day. I shudder at the suffering of my villa each time I'm told of a new winter storm passing through the Veneto.

  Finally, at the beginning of May, we arrive back in Piombino Dese. Nothing has been done to the portico; the south face of the villa is veiled in pipes, plastic, and a small construction elevator. Carl convokes an all-party meeting of our advisers within days of our arrival. We meet on the north portico of the villa amid a mass of blueprints, meticulous drawings, and engineering reports—and a sea of photographs. In addition to Carlo and Ernesto Formentin and Angelo Marconato, we are joined by a consulting architect from Venice whom we have retained to give us a fresh view of the situation. Midway through the meeting Silvana arrives with a round of coffee from the caffe.

  A plan of action emerges, though there is no clear consensus. Carlo reluctantly agrees to write to the Belle Arti office stating that for the safety and preservation of the villa we must begin restoration of the portico in the middle of next week with or without a permit. The replacement of the beams will be determined on a beam-by-beam basis. Though the ultrasound inspection report indicates that sixteen beams will require complete replacement, six can be spliced and reinforced with steel and two will require only steel reinforcement. Angelo tells us that he will place the spliced beams in locations that seem to bear less lateral stress. The planks and terrazzo will be completely replaced.

  I am not clear whether Carlo actually delivers our message to the Belle Arti office in the terms we directed. Nonetheless, on the day before we are scheduled to begin the repair, he advises us that the permit has been issued.

  Angelo and his crew proceed expeditiously with the extraordinarily complex renovation. We watch anxiously as the terrazzo and planks are removed. The heavy beams are extracted and replaced in pairs so the lateral support is not compromised at any time. We feel relief only when all the subflooring planks have been installed and secured, leaving the portico ready for the installation of new terrazzo on
top.

  Ernesto identifies for us an artisan, Rodolfo De Monte, who has the skill to re-create terrazzo veneziano using the same techniques that Palladio's own workers used. Rodolfo inspects the old terrazzo carefully before Angelo removes it.

  “Do you have any old bricks we can grind up, sixteenth-century bricks?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I reply. A few years ago, before my first encounter with Villa Cornaro, I would have considered such an inquiry absurd, but in fact we have a tall stack of old bricks that Dick Rush acquired in an unfulfilled plan to built a period wall along one side of the property.

  “Eccellente!” Rodolfo nods. “That will save money.” In addition to ground bricks, the terrazzo will have fragments of local stone in several colors, all set in a cementitious paste and then ground down to a smooth, shining surface.

  Palladio gives some practical advice on terrazzo in Four Books.

  Those terrazzi are excellent which are of pounded bricks, and small gravel, and lime of river pebbles, or the paduan, well pounded. [Elsewhere he defines paduan as “a scaly rugged stone, taken from the hills of Padua.”

  Palladio omits the fact—which he must have known—that workers in his time tended to dump into the terrazzo not just “pounded bricks,” gravel, and river pebbles, but almost anything else they found around the job site. The original terrazzo in one of Villa Cornaro's upstairs bedrooms includes a smoothed and polished peach pit, as well as part of an old handmade nail. Contessa Emo told me that the original terrazzo at Villa Barbaro has a fragment of a blue-and-white plate.

  Rodolfo's disappointing news is that he cannot begin his work until the fall; cool weather is required for mixing and applying the terrazzo.

  The centuries-old process that Rodolfo and his crew commence in the fall is fascinating. If the elevator for bringing the materials up from the ground were not there to spoil the effect, I could imagine Elena Cornaro standing in my stead, watching as the original pavement is installed. Rodolfo begins by having his men spread a four-inch layer of a wet pewter-gray cementlike material. While the mixture is still a viscous liquid, he personally sprinkles the brick shards and two types of colored stone onto the surface, pulling large handfuls from big gray cloth sacks slung over his shoulders. The key to the final look is the density and mix of the stones he is scattering with a deliberate, repetitive motion. The fragments are pressed down into the matrix with large flat boards. Like all true artisans, Rodolfo uses no guide except his own lifetime of experience and his memory of the original terrazzo pattern, which he has studied carefully. He is the third generation of pavement artisans in his family; he confides to me with a sigh that he has no sons, and his daughters cannot be expected to continue the strenuous family tradition.