Our first stop is brief—the late-eleventh-century Benedictine Abbazia di Praglia, just where the dramatic Colli Euganei, Euganean Hills, begin. A pity to visit on Sunday during mass, as the cloisters, chapter room, and refectory hall are closed. I’d especially wanted to see the library. The good work of the monks is mending books. In the shop, which is open, they sell extensive herbal homeopathic tisanes, acacia and chestnut honey, and various elixirs with substantial alcohol percentages. We do get to see the abbey church, a massive, rather squat building that makes me think of a puffed-up gray toad. It’s packed inside. So lovely to step in and smell the spicy incense.
* * *
ARQUÀ PETRARCA SOUNDS as ancient as it is. Like Petra, it seems half as old as time. Arquà clings to a craggy hillside, a jewel box of stone houses that look carved from amber. The early humanist poet Francesco Petrarca died here. His ardent sonnets to a woman only identified as Laura strongly influenced the direction of Western poetry. What was supposedly his house remains. He was born in Arezzo, near Cortona, and that house also still stands. How likely is it that a poet born in 1304 has two extant houses? Only in Italy.
His shady, hidden house is closed and I can only stand outside and muse. Perhaps his idealized love never really existed, but there’s a story that Laura de Noves, the woman likely to have inspired Petrarca’s passions, was exhumed much later. A box holding a poem by Petrarca and an image of a woman tearing at her breast was found in the grave. Who knows? This Laura supposedly was married and the mother of eleven. She died at thirty-eight, still chaste in Petrarca’s mind.
Whether she was or not, the poems are real. And the Petrarcan legacy is revered: His form and Shakespeare’s give us our two principal sonnet types. He was the first to write so personally of his beloved’s eyes and spun-gold hair. His work was immensely popular in his lifetime. He struck a chord, became influential, and traveled all over Europe. Arquà was his place of retirement. Still, I’d like to know, did Laura exist?
* * *
WE FOLLOW A sign to Ristorante La Montanella. The parking lot is full. The waiter finds us a table among dozens of well-dressed Italian families. Not a T-shirt or pair of tennis shoes in sight. The men wear sport coats or suits; the women, dresses and jewelry. Even little boys have on pressed shirts. Flowers on each table, white tablecloths, and big napkins. Wine is decanted, prosecco poured. The glass-walled room looks into a wet olive grove with the humped, volcanic Euganean Hills in the distance.
We love to fall into the fine ritual that begins and ends the week: Sunday pranzo. Both Ed and I grew up going to grandparents’ houses on Sunday. Ed to a Minnesota farm table laden with homegrown produce, Polish sausages, and jars of his grandmother’s pickles and beets. The table of my grandmother, Mother Mayes, with a perpetual bowl of wax grapes at the center, was graced with platters of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits light as butterfly wings, and my mother’s watermelon rind or bread-and-butter pickles. My grandmother had a button under her foot to call in Fanny Brown, who had a heavy hand with pepper. I never eat a piece of fried chicken that I don’t think of the dark-crusted breasts that made everyone sneeze.
At La Montanella, it’s soul-food time on Sunday, too—but soul food means pasta with young nettles, celery, and asiago; saddle of rabbit with roasted peppers; grilled guinea hen with bay leaf aromas; and a seventeenth-century recipe for young duck with fruit. The prized prosciutto of the area comes sliced to transparency. Better than it sounds is the little hen of Padua marinated in Aperol spritz. At these lavish Sunday pranzi, no one is in a hurry. This tradition continues to thrive, and why not? It speaks of our best instincts: to gather with those we love and break bread.
* * *
FROM THE ROAD, the hills roll like tidal waves. The area is dotted with thermal pools and spas devoted to mineral waters. Another time, I’d like to check out Abano Terme and Montegrotto Terme, enjoy a soak. Instead, we check into La Tenuta La Pila with a big welcome from Carlotta, who lives at the farm with her family and her parents, Alberto and Raimonda. The guest rooms open onto a shaded loggia with dangling grapes and a garden with roses, pomegranate, jujube, and rows of kiwi. In mid-September, they’ve already covered the pool. The great barn with arches for carts to enter at either end serves as a lobby, a long, cool space with rush chairs and a table made from the ancient pila, unearthed when the owners converted the barn. The pila is a six-foot-long stone about four feet high, with three deep hollowed-out basins where rice was husked by gentle battering. We meet the whole vivacious, outgoing family. “Kiwi,” Alberto tells us, “grows well here. Italy produces quantities of kiwi second only to New Zealand. And you don’t have to pay for the airfare!”
“Tomorrow morning, you will have our jams,” Carlotta says. She shows us the enormous game room and library above the lobby. We love the place—you could be nowhere else but Italy. Agriturismi are like that. You can forge relationships with local people. The farms can be spotty, but choose carefully and you will have an unforgettable experience.
Montagnana, a short drive from La Pila, is ringed by two kilometers of high crenellated walls with twenty-four hexagonal towers. The perimeter of this intact little city looks constructed with those expensive block sets we used to buy for William. Double gates and a greensward where the moat once was. The interior is enchanting: arcaded sidewalks; a piazza with its crown jewel, the soaring Gothic duomo of pale stone; many cafés, gelato and pastry shops, and a paternal Garibaldi, unifier of Italy, lording over the piazza, as he so often does. A sign reminds: The porticos of Montagnana are not a latrine for your dog. Indeed, the streets are clean. We walk and walk. I love the clock tower on Santa Maria Assunta. A star-studded face and intricate gold hands tell us it’s already five o’clock. We’re lucky the doors are still open because inside we get to see a pair of Giorgione paintings. He’s rare to stumble upon. Here, he’s painted an odd pairing. On the left, David holding the head of Goliath. David looks robust, not the slight youth I imagine. On the right, there’s Judith, having just sliced through the neck of Holofernes. She’s looking down and what must be his head is a blur; the fresco is damaged. In the background, a white city and what could be read as the Euganean Hills.
* * *
OUR FRIEND STEVEN is going to be late. He happened upon a festival in a small town and stopped to photograph people in medieval dress. We meet at Antica Trattoria Bellinazzo, serving up cucina tipica since 1885 in tiny Carpi. Alberto recommended it to us as an authentic Veneto experience. Simple and welcoming, with square tables, typical farm chairs, and light that could be a bit less bright. As the prosecco is poured, Steven arrives in a rush. Hugs all around. “We do meet like this,” Ed says.
“These old-style trattorias—I hope they last forever.” Steven settles his lenses and camera in the empty chair. The cin-cins begin. The talk. The laughs.
Among families with babies, lone diners, and couples, we are the only foreigners, as we were last night in Valdobbiadene. And this definitely is not a tourist menu. It features thinly sliced colt, a donkey stew, and another secondo of horse, along with many other meats. After such a staggering lunch, Ed manages to sample again the excellent prosciutto of Montagnana, and Steven and I order a platter of cheeses and grilled vegetables. We all choose the whole-grain bigoli pasta—a fat spaghetti—also with vegetables. There’s no question that we will have the celebratory red wine of the area, amarone. My favorite. After every rich, sumptuous drop disappears, the waiter opens another bottle and offers three glasses. We linger until we’re the last.
* * *
WE MEANT TO depart early, but we sleep late—dreams tinged, no doubt, with amarone—then feel so at home at breakfast that we don’t leave until eleven. The cook has made scrambled eggs, the vivid gold of hens who eat—what else?—polenta. Alberto comes in and tells us about surrounding towns. We start calling him professore. Then the cook asks if we’ll try her pear tiramisù. How can we refuse? Ah, creamy, with crun
chy pears. I could eat the whole bowl.
* * *
FOR STEVEN, ON the way out we stop again at honey-colored Arquà Petrarca, seeing it with new eyes after Alberto explained to us that it was rebuilt after the death of Petrarca to honor his Tuscan hometown of Arezzo. Is that true? It does, now that he has said so, look like a stony Tuscan town. The skies open, slicking the streets, drenching us. No one, again, is out. Arquà, sleeping a hundred-year sleep.
* * *
USUALLY I WOULD be disappointed to visit a garden in the rain but the downpour that starts as we enter Valsanzibio casts a misty spell. Black swans with red beaks and wild eyes cruise the ascending pools. Through the veil of rain, all is dark green (boxwood hedges and cypresses) and glassy gray-blue water. The seventeenth-century Venetian owners stepped off a boat that brought them through a network of canals to their opulent landing, where a pavilion with statues of Diana and hunting dogs looms above the water. The Venetians of my imagining are elegant in silks and velvets. We wear wet tennis shoes and carry one broken umbrella among us. We wait out the rain under its shelter. The garden feels moody, as though the music of Erik Satie should be playing in the distance or someone on a white horse should gallop along the edge of the water. We’re alone and feel like we might have just arrived in the afterlife.
When the rain pauses, we explore. The garden layout is the Roman decumanus, east-west, intersected by the cardo, north-south. There’s a philosophy behind the design, as the walk symbolizes a person’s journey toward perfectibility. The boxwood maze should conjure the kind of musings that lead to meditation in the hermit grotto. Soul-stopping are two historic weeping beech trees that seem alive with spirits of their own. We come upon dozens of statues of allegorical figures, some sacred, some pagan. The garden turns playful. A series of hidden fountains sprays on and off as you traverse the approach to the private villa. Under two flowing marble basins lie mythical canine creatures, water falling forever into their open mouths. The journey seems to end at the divine villa. I, too, might imagine I’d reached worldly perfectibility if it were mine. The seven steps leading up to the front garden are engraved with verses that extol the beauty of the place and tell you that you will laugh and not cry, that here Saturn does not eat his own children and Mercury loses all his fraud and Jupiter is smiling. The Christian goal seems to have been forgotten in favor of the pagans who might frolic in the garden.
Three stories, faded coral and cream, the house is bliss. The Venetians had a genius for domestic architecture. This one, not overly grandiose or forbidding, looks ready for someone to fling open the shutters and invite us to come in.
Gardens and houses. My obsessions. He was onto it, this Gregorio Barbarigo, the mastermind of this symbolic garden walk. Everything you bring or grow or create or care for in this realm moves you closer to the life more abundant.
* * *
TO CATCH A bite before Steven takes off for Vicenza, we drive into Este and find Trattoria Al Cavallino. All the pastas sound good. When we can’t decide, the waiter suggests a tris, a third portion each of three types. A fine idea. We fall into reminiscing about other meals, other places. Steven will go to Vicenza for tonight, then on to Alto Adige. We will meet again, where? Este hadn’t been on my list, but now after a walk around the piazza, I am smitten. We will drive on to watery Mira, the Palladian villa area, but will come back tomorrow. Here, in the rain, we part with Steven.
We’ve spent time in Ferrara, a complex city of bicycles, memories of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and the historic crown jewel of the Este family. But the Estes were originally from this small town named for them in the Veneto.
Their castle grounds are now a public park, where the sweet scent of roses hits you from yards away as you enter. The Museo Nazionale Atestino, a spectacular archeological collection, too, is on these grounds. I know many people glaze over in the endless archeological museums in Italy (Ed often is ahead of me, checking his phone), but I fall into a trance when looking at the safety pins, tweezers, cooking pots, and jewelry of ancient people. They were like us. I like the skeleton from 900 B.C. She’s wearing hoop earrings. She was just shy of five feet tall. Double hoop earrings. Yes, like us, and so long ago.
Este is the home of a graceful oval duomo, with a Tiepolo painting of Santa Thecla freeing Este from the 1630 plague. A run-down villa faces the duomo courtyard (awaiting an inspired restoration); and a path up leads to a dark wooden Alpine-style villa where poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron, visited. I’m smitten with the town’s clock tower, its blue, star-spangled face. Ed favors the bar Al Canton, tiny, with black-trimmed forties wood paneling and nautilus-shaped lights they’ll never be able to replace. There, we have a perfect espresso and tell the barista that Carlo Scarpa would have loved the place. He agrees. Italy: where the barista knows who Carlo Scarpa is.
* * *
SETTING PLACES FOR dinner gives me as much happiness as cooking—what’s on the table being the complement to what’s served. In the early years of our Italian travels, I began to buy a bowl or platter in towns with a history of ceramic design. I like taking down the lemon platter and thinking of Sicily. The rooster pitcher reminds me of Orvieto. And we have Cortona’s eighteenth-century yellow pattern with a sunflower in the middle. How many broken pieces of that have I dug up in my garden? I abandoned the collecting because I ran out of space, but I’m still drawn to traditional patterns, curious about how they speak of the history of the town. In that spirit, we follow a sign beside the Duomo: Este Ceramiche. We find a SPACE (outlet) sign at the end of the street along a canal but the door is locked. From the other side of the street, a young woman, who seems to glow with energy, leans out of a doorway. She will open the shop for us.
Immediately we see that this is not typical majolica. Este Ceramiche Porcellane’s designs are refined and exquisite. Since 1780, production has continued on this spot, with the canal once transporting the wares to Venice and Padua. Dior, Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman—the marks on the bottoms of the seconds show the clientele. The items are totally reasonable in price. I buy several gifts and a—where will I put it?—platter for Bramasole. By now we’ve had a lovely conversation with Isabelle Fadigati, daughter of the store’s owner. She invites us over to meet her father and to see the workshop, where the hand painting is in progress.
What a trove. A trionfo is a historic centerpiece for a grand table. They’re still made here. Tall, extravagant, with vase shapes, piled porcelain fruit, little baskets and other removable parts dangling, they’re often found on palace tables. I admire other objects, too, such as boxwood urns and grape-topped tureens. Anyone with a passion for china has to swoon over the dinnerware patterns—florals based on historic designs, charming hunt scenes, African animals, grape clusters and vines, and paste-white dishes with monograms or insignias. I like the playful plates with trompe-l’oeil ceramic fruits, olives, vegetables, or candies attached. These are said to have once signaled that a dinner had finished. Some of us need to be placed in restraints at this point. Time to go!
NOTE:
Nearby Nove, another historic ceramic center, has the Museo della Ceramica in Palazzo De Fabris, plus workshops around town.
Named a hill of flint in the Roman era, Monselice served as a quarry for the paving in Piazza San Marco in Venezia. It’s a walled town in a dramatic position, with a looming background hill crowned by a castle. We are stopping, at the recommendation of the Este Ceramiche’s owner Giovanni Fadigati, for a late, late lunch at Ristorante La Torre, next to the town’s thirteenth-century Torre dell’Orologio, clock tower. We’re late and in the restaurant, only an ancient woman and her daughter are left dining.
Here’s where I have the best pasta ever.
The waiter comes out with a box of white truffles. “The first of the year,” he says. “I recommend the ravioli filled with Taleggio, served with truffles and a touch of butter.” We wait with a glass of prosec
co. Then comes the pile of thin lardo surrounded by quarters of figs and sliced smoked goose breast with toasts and curls of butter.
The plain pasta bowls arrive and the woodsy scent of the truffles rises. The ravioli is light, not chewy. Taleggio is one of my favorite cheeses, and this has melted to a creamy richness that marries the generous shavings of truffle.
“This is good?” the waiter asks. No, it’s heaven.
* * *
UP THE HILL after lunch. It’s hot. This via al Santuario passes Villa Nani-Mocenigo, whose tall stone walls are decorated with eighteenth-century stone statues of dwarfs. They used to be the mascots at court, of course, and many have been immortalized by painters. What the story is for this villa, I don’t know. Nani means “dwarfs.” I recall a story of a rich family, all small, who didn’t want their daughter to know she was different, and so hired only nani. The girl’s companion, however, began to grow and I don’t remember the no-doubt unsettling end.
The dwarf-topped wall is alive with the biggest caper plants I’ve ever seen. A vast stone stairway leads to some intriguing garden but, of course, the gate is locked. We climb to the top, rewarded with the Santuario delle Sette Chiese, six pretty chapels, each with a different painting above the altar. They’re architecturally identical. The Villa Duodo (1593) and the octagonal Chiesa di San Giorgio, the seventh, larger chapel end the sanctuary walk.
See You in the Piazza Page 11