—The beckoning counts, not the clicking of the latch behind you.
—To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.
—Surely of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.
And maybe the most useful:
—One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.
* * *
WE WALK ALONG the outside walls of her garden—too tall to peek over—where an old community wash station still stands: three descending stone troughs of clear water where you can scrub, soak, then rinse. Spring-fed, or from the aqueduct? Did her maid wash the sheets here? There must have been piles of them judging from the number of guests she entertained. Farther on, we’re quickly outside town but on another narrow road where you could get your toes run over if you’re not careful. Soon there are tall iron gates, proud and dreamy villas in the distance, a realization that town is only the nucleus for life lived large on grand terms.
* * *
CARS ARE THE bane. Everyone is on their way through, it seems. Many towns in Italy have banned them from the centro. But in Asolo, where else could they go? The ways in are steep and few and the way out very narrow. There’s no level field for a parking lot. Somehow, cars are prohibited on Saturday, market day, and second Sundays, when there’s a book and antique sale in the old commercial arcade. On walks, we must flatten ourselves against a wall when a delivery truck brushes our eyelashes. Yet around the piazza, there’s little traffic.
I begin to notice that several storefronts are empty. Is Asolo losing its cachet? There are shops for shirts made to measure, but the forno is closed. Maybe it’s temporary. “No, Signora,” the waiter at the Enoteca alle Ore says, “Asolo è pieno di turisti.” Full of tourists. I don’t see them. He pours glasses of DOCG Colli Asolani/Asolo prosecco, for which the area is famed. It’s ethereal, full of pep. The chandeliers over the bar are completely romantic—drooping waterfalls of crystals shedding a golden light. Ed breaks off a hunk of pinza—moist, crumbly, tastes of figs. I think it could use a tad of sugar. (Maybe, like the Tuscan chestnut flour cake, castagnaccio, to love it, you should have been given your first slice at age two.) We buy a few bottles of prosecco to take home. We will remember, on a late summer evening, our visit to Asolo.
* * *
WHAT AN IMPOSING cathedral. “I’m churched out,” Ed says. He sits down and consults his phone messages and I wander for a few minutes. Here’s a painting of the Assumption by Lorenzo Lotto. Ed sees me standing still before it and comes to see. “The clouds around her look like clumps of popcorn.” We laugh.
“This church is really old,” I begin. “Built on the foundations of a much earlier church…”
“Let’s go,” he says.
* * *
TONIGHT AT LA Terrazza, the hotel restaurant, the moon cooperates, a waxing gibbous disappearing and appearing among high clouds. End of May and we’re alone on the dinner terrace and the dining room remains empty. Where is everyone? We pretend it’s all ours: this view, the sparkling prosecco, and the attentive service. We are overlooking the vast, sunset-colored Villa Scotti-Pasini, where Browning lived, and the Piazza Garibaldi. I’m happy with my little Parmigiano basket filled with mushrooms and fondue, Ed with his tempura scallops on a smoked pepper cream. By now Ed has looked up Browning, and quotes: “Italia’s rare/O’errunning beauty crowds the eyes…”
“Is that from Asolando?” I ask.
“Yes. ‘Crowds the eye’ is kind of a bold choice, don’t you think?”
“Sometimes you do feel that. Too much to take in. But bold is that ‘O’errunning’—sounds like the word itself is overrunning.” We’re served our secondi: Ed’s tuna in a pistachio crust, and my pork tenderloin with grilled polenta. We eat every delicious morsel. Our Browning talk fades and we turn to plans for tomorrow, lingering over coffee.
* * *
BACK IN OUR attic room, sleep won’t come. How can the shape of a room throw me back to my first months of college? How at sea I felt, seven hundred miles from the home I wanted to escape. A churning time—and now, decades later, I churn again. Nothing is ever forgotten, is it?
Beside me, Ed wakes from a nightmare: He’s in a closed car that has broken through the ice on the Mississippi and has been swept downstream under a thick layer. He wakes up. “Do you think we should have opted for the larger room?” He opens the shade that has blacked out any light and a faint glow enters.
Finally, I fall asleep.
* * *
ONLY TEN KILOMETERS away is Palladio’s Villa Barbaro, designed in 1560. Of the Palladian villas I’ve seen, this one is my favorite. Instead of the monumental perfection of Villa La Rotunda and others, Villa Barbaro invites you to imagine the actual lives of the people who built such a house, and of those who still live there. There’s a musical rhythm yet rigorous symmetry to the architecture. The residential central core, pure as a Greek temple, is flanked by long lower wings called barchesse, farming structures, which end in graceful dovecotes almost as tall as the central portion, their façades adorned with sundials. “Why such huge dovecotes?” I wonder. “Surely they didn’t roast that many pigeons?”
“Must have been for getting messages to Venice. Homing pigeons. Can’t you imagine Daniele Barbaro tying a paper to a pigeon’s leg, come for the grape harvest…”
Inside is purely glorious. Where on earth are there more charming frescoes than these of Veronese that adorn Villa Barbaro? The surprise, after all the religious art that dominates one’s Italian experience, comes from the scholarly Barbaro family, who preferred a splashy, whimsical celebration of love and harmony for their country home. Entering the villa in paper shoes to protect the floors, you’re drawn into a fantasy of muses with musical instruments, trompe-l’oeil doors opened by renderings of Barbaro family members and servants, and idyllic landscapes behind painted balustrades. Gaze and gaze on the Sala dell’Olimpo, Hall of Olympus, for it is full of flights of fancy and a joyous design of figures emanating from the philosophy of the good life. In the center of the wide coved ceiling, there’s—not the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, as I first thought—but a female representing Divine Wisdom. So that’s the center of this universe! Wisdom is surrounded by the Olympian gods and zodiacal signs. At the angles: figures representing Earth, Air, Fire, Water. Large medallions on the four sides show white, classical figures of Fortune, Fertility, Abundance, Love. (We could all do with some of these pagan values.) Below the ceiling are painted stone balconies, overlooking the room below. A parrot perches beside an elaborately dressed woman standing between a small boy and a dark-skinned wet nurse, who holds a little dog. Daniele Barbaro leans over his large hunting dog, and another Barbaro man is shown reading. There are dogs all over these frescoes, but I see only one cat. Other small details, such as a pair of slippers and a brush, add to the high-low program of these frescoes. Lesson learned: Harmony is found on both celestial and familiar levels.
There’s more. In the courtyard behind the house, the Nymphaeum, a half-moon pool of spring-fed water, backed by a stucco wall with statues installed in niches. A short distance away rises Palladio’s Tempietto, a severely classical temple that reminds me of a miniature of the Pantheon. Inside, as in his glorious church Il Redentore in Venice, the Tempietto is incandescent. The circular plan feels intimate and lofty; if you leapt, you might rise to the oculus at the center of the dome. Anyone laid to rest here will certainly ascend to heaven.
Villa Barbaro—Palladio’s last work, an embarrassment of riches, a house out of a dream, and this Tempietto, where architecture gets to embody the word holy.
* * *
AFTER A LONG pause in our room, late in the day, we venture out. We turn onto via Santa Caterina, pass the Hotel Villa Cipriani, where Freya and her friends used to dine, and continue down the hill and out
of town, stopping to look at a magnificent villa and garden with a one-eyed, scraggly cat, quite out of place, and a view of another villa, so Platonically ideal it is like a cutout pasted against a hill of cypress trees. We’re looking at Villa Contarini degli Armeni, which once belonged to Armenian monks, whose order still practices book arts nearby, on the Venetian lagoon island of San Lazzaro. We pause at Villa Longobardo, hard by the road; it’s referred to in books as a palace, but it’s really quite small—and strange. On the shutters we make out zodiac symbols. Inscriptions cross the façade above the windows. The structure has nothing to do with the Longobards. One inscription on the façade includes the word longobardus, referring to Lombardia, where the architect of the house was born. The curvaceous caryatids look as if they were sculpted out of sand. Mysterious, weird. Inside, a wizard might be mixing alchemical concoctions.
We are walking to the hillside Cimitero di Asolo at Sant’Anna, where Freya is buried. We see the grave of the Italian actress Eleonora Duse first. Just her name and dates. Someone has left primroses. A lizard suns on the stone. All quiet now, but what wild times she must have had with her lover, the flamboyant proto-fascist poet and World War One hero, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who changed the flowers around his bed three times a day.
We don’t find Freya. We stumble upon some startling room-size mausoleums in the fascist rationalist style, but most of our discoveries are just plain graves decorated with photos of the occupant and many flowers. A woman has brought gardening gloves, clippers, and new plants. She’s ripping out the winter dead. There!—Freya lies just a few feet from Eleonora. Her blindingly white stone says “1893–1993.” And below her name, simply “Writer & Traveller.” There’s another name on the stone: Herbert Hammerton Young, died 1941. He was the great family friend who gave Freya her villa. I should have brought flowers; she has none.
* * *
WE COLLECT OUR luggage and load the car. In the market there are no flowers but I buy a healthy basil plant in a plastic pot. I’m sure Freya knew the Keats poem “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil.” Driving out of town, we stop again at the cemetery. I leave the basil on Freya’s stone. I hope someone will water it.
NOTES:
Freya Stark’s villa: Later, after coming upon an article by Kristian Buziol, who restored Freya’s garden, I regret not seeing it. A visit can be arranged through BellAsolo Tours in Asolo. www.bellasolo.it.
Two excellent videos on Palladio’s Villa Barbaro and the Tempietto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5mZ_7qAEi4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETwMXnGpKsE
Visiting Villa Barbaro reminded me of Sally Gable’s Palladian Days: Finding a New Life in a Venetian Country House. Said house is Palladio’s Villa Cornaro. This is a moving text describing the joys and foibles of taking on a piece of the world patrimony.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio—Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War informs, amuses, and repels in equal parts. D’Annunzio was a prolific writer, a war hero, and a fascinating player in the history of fascism. Writing in Atlas Obscura, Romie Stott claims that D’Annunzio, being bored with bourgeois democracy and wanting more romanticism, “invented fascism as an art project.” An egomaniac and an influential writer, he thought the business of the state should be music. D’Annunzio’s novel The Flame of Life (Il fuoco, 1900) is a fictionalized story of his affair with Eleonora Duse.
Prosecco land, just two hours northwest of Venice. Cin cin! Ruggeri Vineyard won the award for best sparkling wine of the year 2016 from the respected Gambero Rosso, whose trusted guides rate wines and restaurants. To taste this elixir, we’ve come by train, from Cortona to Mestre, seedy gateway to Venice, and picked up a car. Would it really be so much trouble to put up some signs in that chaos of a train station? We find the rental car agency not in the station at all but about a block down an iffy street where men are loitering and drinking.
At least the exit from the city is easy. Soon we are maneuvering the roundabouts, aiming toward Valdobbiadene—Val-doh-BE-ah-den-a—what a fun word to pronounce, and to Villa Sandi, a top vineyard and restaurant with seven rooms upstairs. Since our room isn’t ready, we have an early lunch on the covered terrace. Barely seated, we’re handed a cold flute of Villa Sandi prosecco. The tables are set with flowered crockery plates, each one different, and vintage crocheted and lace tablecloths. Across the lawn, hundreds of cyclists gather to register for a race tomorrow and to enjoy some wine and live music. American songs accompany scrumptious truffled gnocchi with a light guinea hen sauce: Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell—we could sing along.
* * *
THE SMALL BEDROOM has an alpine feel: cabinets of unfinished wood, plank floor, and a rustic bed with drifty mosquito netting. In the Gambero Rosso, we often look at recommended restaurants that have the little bed symbol. It’s nice to have dinner and not have to drive. Climb the stairs and buona notte. The rooms are usually simple, as this one is, but satisfying for a night.
After a quick settling in, we leave to find that primo Giustino B. prosecco—only three minutes away.
* * *
ALREADY AT THE door when we arrive, Paolo Bisol steps out to greet us. In a pale floral shirt, he looks more like an artist than a man of the land. Slender and quick, he has warm brown eyes that instantly reveal a sense of humor. We hop in his Land Rover and bounce along narrow roads, looking straight up and down at steep vineyards, then turn onto the roughest, rockiest track I’ve ever been on. The car lurches and bumps. We pull up to a panoramic point of the vineyard where he brakes beside a gnarled four-hundred-year-old chestnut tree in a clearing.
He points to a large boulder with embedded fossils, then to a tall upside-down conical structure he calls a cannone, a cannon. We can see two others in the distance. “Stops the hail,” he explains. To our quizzical looks he shrugs. “Diccono,” so they say. “There’s some merit. The theory is that gas is siphoned into the cone and we make a sort of explosion that blows up and rearranges the air.”
From our experience with olives, we know that hail is the most feared of the weather phenomena. Any desperate measure is worth trying.
La vendemmia, the harvest, started early this year because of intense summer heat and little rain. He’s not trimmed back the foliage at all. The grapes needed the protection of the leaves. In the lush and green vineyards, golden bunches catch the sun and glow as though each little globe is luminescent. We sample as we go. A ladder made from a split log with rungs notched into the wood testifies to the long tradition of the hands-on life in the vineyard. Paolo shows us a section of twisted and gnarled vines seventy to a hundred years old; they produce a special vintage.
Returning to the office, we follow trucks piled with grapes. They line up at the back of the building. Paolo’s vivacious daughter Isabella joins us but rushes off; she’s setting up food on a long table for the harvesters. Growers drive up to a stainless-steel bin just the length of the side of the truck. With a marvelous whoosh, the grapes fall in, while a man with a long pitchfork helps ease them into the revolving crusher.
“Like looking at the fire,” one worker observes as we stand watching the late-afternoon sun angling over the tumbling bunches. Paolo quotes Galileo, “Il vino e la luce del sole tenuta insieme dall’acqua.” “Wine is sunlight held together by water.”
Upstairs in his sleek conference room, we taste, don’t talk much, letting the Giustino B. speak. “One hundred percent glera grapes. Named for my father, who started the vineyard. Not the more floral style of other areas,” he comments. I agree. There’s a glass shelf of fossils on display and I imagine that a touch of minerality comes from the ancient shells deep in the soil. “Giustino B. is a reference point for all prosecco,” Gambero Rosso asserts. High praise, justified. We select a mixed case of Ruggeri wines and prosecco to share with Tuscan friends.
* * *
* * *
A HARD START to the race. It’s pouring; no blue breaking through the clouds. We wave; the cyclists have their heads down. Doubtlessly cursing. From the vantage of the car, the hills look dreamy in the rain. Onward from Valdobbiadene, a blessed area. Besides our friends at Ruggeri and Villa Sandi, many wine magicians perform their sorcery in these glera-covered hills: Bisol, Adami, Bortolomiol, and dozens of others.
We keep two bottles on the backseat for tonight. Farther south, we’ll be toasting with a friend.
Dropping deeper into the Veneto from Valdobbiadene, our destination is an agriturismo called La Tenuta La Pila, a kiwi, pear, and apple farm. Although a half hour away from the towns we want to explore, we couldn’t resist reserving at such an intriguing place. We are meeting our friend Steven Rothfeld for the night. Based in Napa Valley, he frequently works in Italy on photography assignments—and we have worked together on several books. I feel lucky when we intersect somewhere.
See You in the Piazza Page 10