Palladian Days

by Sally Gable

  When the last of the scaffolding has been dismantled and carted away, the last worker has left, and Carl and I stand alone on the portico with the fields stretching away from us to the south, it is easier to admire the glistening new surface—a perfect re-creation of the sample we have retained of the old pavement—than it is to recall all the exasperated transatlantic phone calls and frustrating meetings that were required to bring it about. And, though the process still rankles, we are comforted by our assurance that the work meets the ultimate test that we apply to everything we do at Villa Cornaro: Palladio would be pleased.

  52

  Natives

  “Che bella!” Giacomo exclaims as we emerge from the stazione and pause at the top of the steps leading down to the streaming life of the Grand Canal. Fractals of sunlight dance on the water. Vaporetti stream back and forth on the busy waterway, ferrying commuting workers from Piazzale Roma to their offices and shops, students to their schools, and tourists to their first monument of the day. On the opposite shore the oddly proportioned dome of the church of San Simeone Piccolo sits atop the skyline like a green overcooked egg. A liquid ochre light suffuses the morning air. Silvana joins Giacomo in admiring the fairyland scene. Silvana has accompanied me on several previous excursions into Venice, but this is only Giacomo's fourth visit to Venice in his entire life— and the first in more than twenty years—despite his living just twenty miles away.

  Silvana surprised Carl and me two weeks ago by asking whether on some future Monday—”closed” day at Caffe Palladio—we would lead them on a tour of Venice. For years Giacomo has watched as Carl and I troop off to Venice, sometimes several mornings a week. At last his curiosity about Venice's attraction for us has overcome his reluctance to leave his familiar world of Piom-bino Dese. We are quick to comply, happy for two reasons: first, because they feel comfortable asking us and, second, because they would trust so much of their limited free time to our guidance.

  Carl is careful to put a Venice street map in his back pocket for the excursion, even though we seldom use one anymore. “I couldn't stand the embarrassment if we got lost with the Miolos in tow,” he says sheepishly.

  From the train station we set off on foot. Silvana has quietly reminded us that Giacomo is timorous around water, so we forgo a vaporetto ride. Our first stop is a quick peek into the church of San Simeone Grande. Confusingly the church of San Simeone Grande (large) is quite small—much smaller than the nearby church of San Simeone Piccolo (small). Originally, each of the islands that make up Venice was a separate parish with its own parish church. Most of those parish churches remain active today, avoiding the merger and conglomeration that assail most other aspects of modern life.

  We want the Miolos to see San Simeone Grande because it typifies so much of the charm and constant freshness of Venice. Its exterior is as nondescript as the small campo on which it sits; it appears in no guidebook itinerary of suggested tourist stops. Yet, when we step into the cool, calm interior, we point Giacomo and Silvana to a magnificent painting hanging on the north wall, The Last Supper, by the late-Renaissance master Tintoretto. The impact of the painting itself is heightened by the zest of discovery.

  Standing before it, we are suddenly washed by streams of Buxtehude's Prelude in C tumbling from a small tracker organ high above the main entrance. No Mass is under way, so we are free to wander about, but we stand immobile, deeply moved by the music filling the nave. The organist concludes his performance with the final prolonged chords, then breaks the spell cast upon us by beginning to practice separate passages of the work. Giacomo wants to tarry, but we pull him away. Carl and I call the constant drive to see as many sites as possible the “tourist imperative,” but I don't know how to say that in Italian.

  “This is just an antipasto,” I tell him instead. “The feast is still ahead.”

  We're headed for the church of the Frari, but we pause en route at Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista to admire Pietro Lombardo's stately marble entranceway from about 1480. Inside is Codussi's masterful early-Renaissance stairway, but we don't have time this morning to talk our way past the obdurate receptionist who usually blocks access to it.

  The Frari looms over its San Polo neighborhood, not far from the geographical center of Venice. The church, begun by the Franciscan monks in the late thirteenth century, is one of the two great mendicant-friar churches of Venice. (The other is the Dominicans’ church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.) Much grander than parish churches, both are towering testimony to the appeal of the mendicant orders in early Venice. Today they are potent reminders of the contemporary burden of the Church in maintaining the thousands of religious and artistic treasures throughout Venice and the rest of Italy.

  The Frari has been a particular favorite of ours, I tell the Miolos, since we attended an organ concert there during our first spring at Piombino Dese. The monastic church is home to two magnificent period organs; both date from the 1700s, but one is from early in the century and the other late. The concert was carefully planned to show the evolution of organs in that period. With the audience seated on folding chairs placed temporarily in the choir, facing Titian's luminous Assumption of the Virgin over the central altar, the recitalist played the first half of the program on the 1732 organ, perched high over the north choir stalls, creating a simple, sweet singing tone. For the second half of the program he crossed to the 1794 organ, whose flute and reed stops produced a much more complex and colorful—though no more beautiful—sound.

  Carl leads Giacomo and Silvana into the Frari's Cornaro Piscopia Chapel, added at the north end of the main altar in about 1420 by Giovanni Cornaro of the family's Piscopia branch. Although ostensibly created to honor Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice, the chapel has as its highlight a statuary monument depicting an angel with a scroll eulogizing the patron's father. One writer calls it “one of the most beautiful monuments of the Venetian Renaissance.” Nonetheless, many guidebooks mention it only in passing, if at all.

  Next we shuttle the Miolos to the sacristy on the opposite side of the church. The wall facing the entrance features an elaborate marble installation deeply carved in dramatic late-baroque figures by Francesco Cabianca, whose brother Bortolo in 1716 created the putti and other stucco decorations at our own Villa Cornaro. For Giacomo, however, the highlight of the Frari—his favorite sight of the whole day—is the Madonna and Child of Giovanni Bellini above the altar of the refectory. The enthroned Madonna is serene, mysterious, oblivious to the cherub musicians playing at her feet.

  “Una meraviglia, una meraviglia. A miracle,” Giacomo murmurs over and over.

  On our way toward the Rialto Bridge we stop for an espresso and brioche. I watch with amusement as Giacomo discreetly studies the small caffe, evaluating it with the trained eye of a competitor. He solemnly agrees with us that Caffe Palladio is handsomer—and has better prices to boot.

  We proceed like chickens: three steps forward, then a pause. Giacomo finds a constant stream of new things to stop and inspect: a Gothic building facade, a strangely shaped chimney, an old religious plaque mounted high on a wall. At the church of San Salva-tore we point out the tomb of Queen Caterina Cornaro and her funeral monument carved by Bernardino Contino in the early 1580s—less than ten years before our own statue of her at Villa Cornaro was created by Camillo Mariani.

  From San Salvatore we detour to show Giacomo and Silvana the lugubrious face carved at the base of the campanile of the church of Santa Maria Formosa. With his usual hyperbole, Ruskin describes it as “huge, inhuman, and monstrous,—leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be beheld for more than an instant.” Giacomo laughs at its grotesqueness, and we all wonder what inspired such a decoration.

  We finish the tour with visits to the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo to see the grave and funeral monument of Doge Marco Cornaro, and to the church of the Holy Apostles, where Giorgio Cornaro—the brother of Queen Caterina Cornaro—is buried in a richly detailed cha
pel in which both Mauro Codussi and Tullio Lombardo had a hand.

  By this time we are all dragging a bit, and Carl and I are concerned that we have worn out our tourists by trying to see too much. We have a late lunch at a small hotel near the train station— a meal distinguished more by the company than the food—and rest our legs on the train ride back to Piombino Dese.

  The next morning, when Silvana arrives to open the shutters at the villa, she brings along a street map of Venice. Will we please trace our itinerary on it? she asks. She and Giacomo want to keep it as a reminder of the day. Carl and I retain our own memories of the day as well; we felt that we were a part of the fabric of the city, like natives showing our home.

  A pleasant group of about twenty visitors from Houston has just finished its tour through the ground floor of the villa. On the south portico I've explained and translated the graffiti and sent them off into the park, recommending that they walk to the seven-arch bridge for the view back at the villa's south facade. I also ask that they exit the grounds by walking around the side of the villa to the front gate, instead of tracking grass clippings and morning dew back through the grand salon. One woman tarries to speak with me.

  “How fortunate that you and your husband are both passionate about the same thing!” she says.

  Her remark startles me. I have never considered the possibility that Carl might have fallen in love with the villa but not I. Or that I might have been enamored by these bricks and intonaco, but Carl not.

  Yet it could have happened that way. How fortuitous, how unlikely, that we both find in our villa, in Venice, in Italy a source of such infinite fascination.

  Villa Cornaro has been the cornerstone of it all. Like a great athletic coach, the villa is at once a disciplinarian, a trainer, and a motivator.

  You can step onto new stages and play new roles, the villa whispers. Find your hidden pools of strength, open yourself to see art with fresh and wider-ranging eyes, examine whole new palettes of color in your everyday life, vault past barriers of language, culture, and habit.

  All to better care for me, my villa tells me.

  53

  Groundhog Day

  Often in Italy I feel like Bill Murray in the film Groundhog Day. The same day is repeated over and over. Each evening I sit on the south portico, mesmerized by the swallows in their timeless gyres. I watch the Cagnins at work in their field across the bridge, or hear their tractor's struggling chug when they pass out of sight. Ilario Mariotto and his brother Silvano work their own fields to the west. Sometimes the crop is corn, sometimes oats or barley; sometimes the field lies fallow for a season. But the same cycle is forever repeated, summer and winter. This portico where I'm sitting has overlooked these fields for 450 years. The Cagnins’ complaining tractor has replaced a team of oxen that were probably equally plaintive; the Cagnins own the field instead of sharecropping for the Cornaros, but the pattern of everyday life is unchanging.

  The national scene gives me the same impression as I puzzle my way through the newspaper account of each day's meaningless changes. The fall of governments follows the fall of governments, bribery scandals succeed bribery scandals, soaring budget deficits surpass soaring budget deficits, scioperi (labor strikes) follow more scioperi.

  Rome is the Eternal City, I think to myself, not because it's ancient but because absolutely nothing ever really changes.

  But then I am awakened by a remark from Silvana at a dinner party for some friends—the Miolos, the Battistons, the Bighins, the Cechettos. Silvana is speaking to Lino Cechetto, but I overhear her.

  “The Mariottos are the last real contadini,” she says, using a word that once denoted peasant farmers and now applies to landowning small-scale farmers as well. Silvana is actually focusing on that peasant tradition. “Ilario farms in all the old ways, uses no fertilizers or insect sprays, shares his home with his cows, makes his own wine from the grapes that he grows, has his own fruit and vegetable garden behind his house,” she continues.

  Silvana leaves me wondering if my original perception has been essentially flawed. These traditions that I see every day, repeating the daily life of centuries, may be in their last generation. Then the contadini—and the way of life they epitomize—will disappear.

  The same may be true on the national level. While nothing seems changed on a daily basis, the contrasts in Italy's political life over time are startling. Rome's government-by-splinter-party has lurched suddenly toward a two-party system. At least the parties have begun to organize themselves into alliances of the center-left and center-right for major elections.

  I'm led to ponder Villa Cornaro itself. Is it the solid and immutable rock that I have always envisioned? Or will it, too, be changed by the transformations that surround it?

  When I first came to Piombino Dese, bicycles filled the racks at the Battistons’ supermercato. Women would purchase only as many groceries as they could carry in two or three plastic bags on their handlebars; they bicycled home through the Via Roma gauntlet of trucks and autos. Now cars crowd the recently expanded parking lot. Women are still the predominant shoppers, but most drive their own cars.

  Many more women work outside the home today than when I first arrived. They drive to dozens of small fabbriche dotting the outskirts of Piombino Dese, or they drive to work at shops in nearby towns. Last Saturday evening Nazzareno joked—but with nostalgia—about Italian women turning into American women, driving their own cars, spending their own money, tending less to homemaking and cooking. Nidi—literally “nests,” but signifying child-care centers—have sprung up in town, both church-sponsored and private, to care for the small children of working mothers. Some working mothers rely on a network of babysitters and their own mothers, but often the grandmothers are working themselves and other would-be babysitters want full-time employment with better wages and pension benefits.

  A take-out pizza parlor appeared last year on Via della Vittoria; it even delivers if you telephone your order. Efficiency is breaking out in state-owned enterprises: staffing in the Piombino Dese train station has shrunk from three workers per shift to just one, as preprinted tickets have replaced the handwritten ones that prevailed earlier.

  Creeping multinationalism invades the school curriculum. English, once a specialized elective, is taught in elementary school in Piombino Dese, with children as young as six receiving three hours of instruction a week. When we first arrived in Piombino Dese I had to speak Italian in order to communicate even the simplest observation or need; abstruse terms—rubinetto (faucet), scalda-bagno (water heater), fognatura (sewage), and fossa (ditch)—salted my new vocabulary. Now many young people speak English well, including Riccardo Miolo and Elisa, Leonardo's fidanzata.

  We can debate whether take-out pizza and English fluency are positive developments or negative, but some of the changes taking place are undeniably for the worse. Michela Scquizzato tells me that her telefonino (cell phone) was lifted while she was shopping at Battiston's. For the last several years, upon leaving the autostrada at the Padova Ovest exit near Limena, we have come to expect a clutch of prostitutes standing beside the road, not just at night but throughout the afternoon. Pulling out from the parking lot of Barbesin, a favorite restaurant near Castelfranco, we are puzzled by the erratic driving of the car ahead of us. Finally we realize that the driver is slowing to inspect the prostitutes strung like gaudy beads along the roadside. Albanians, the newspaper accounts say. The warfare and unrest in the Balkans since the fall of Communism bring boatloads of illegal immigrants across the narrow Adriatic Sea every night. Once in Italy, the immigrants must find an employer willing to hire them without work permits or else drift into burglary, prostitution, or other crime. Albanian gangs are said to be providing competition for the Italian mafiosi. Our Italian friends are as shocked as we to learn one May morning that two young Piombino Dese boys have discovered the body of a murdered Albanian prostitute in the industrial district of town; we find only minimum comfort in the police theory that the
body was merely dumped in Piombino Dese after the murder occurred elsewhere. In the same month, burglars attempt to explode their way into the ATM machine at the branch of Banca Ambrosiana just down Via Roma, and nighttime vandals try to burn the mammoth wooden doors of the parish church by setting fire to oil-soaked rags they have tacked onto them.

  Italy seems certain to survive it all. In his last year in office, Prime Minister Giuliano Amato exhorted his countrymen to respect the tax laws. “Of course we expect a businessman to buy a fur coat for his mistress,” he said understandingly “but he should not deduct it on his taxes as a business expense.”

  When Silvio Berlusconi, Amato's successor, complained about having to move into Palazzo Chigi, the official government residence, because “the food is horrible,” Italians understood. Good food binds Italians in a way that will, I'm sure, survive government efficiency, English fluency, and the euro, just as market day will survive e-commerce.