by Paul Adam
‘How on earth does he do any work in the afternoon?’ an already half-asleep Guastafeste asked me when Rudy had excused himself to go to the Gents’.
‘He doesn’t,’ I replied. ‘He works for an auction house.’
‘Now,’ Rudy said, settling himself back down in his chair and adjusting his jacket over his bulging stomach. ‘The Maggini you asked about.’
He took a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it on the table.
‘November sales, 1998. Violin by Gio Paolo Maggini. Excellent condition, known as the Snake’s Head. We put an estimate on it of between seventy and ninety thousand pounds. In the end it went for a hundred and twenty thousand. Buyer, as you know, Vincenzo Serafin. Now, as I told you before, there was a lot of interest in it on the floor. I obviously don’t have any records of those bidders, but we had written instructions from six telephone bidders – three in America, one in Japan and two in Europe.’
He gave me their names. I recognised all six of them: all well-established dealers who would have been bidding on their own account or perhaps – like Serafin – for some wealthy collector who preferred to remain anonymous.
‘Did Scott bid for it?’ I asked.
‘I couldn’t tell you. He’d have been on the floor, not the phone. He may well have done, I don’t remember.’
‘What about the provenance?’
‘It has an interesting history,’ Rudy said. ‘Unlucky. A bit like the Bott.’
‘Really?’ The Bott was a Stradivari violin reputed to be cursed because so many unfortunate – and tragic – things had happened to successive owners.
‘There appears to be reliable documentation going back to the middle of the nineteenth century when George Hart, the London dealer, acquired it,’ Rudy continued. ‘The seller was the widow of a man who had been murdered by footpads – muggers to us – while on his way home from the theatre one evening. Hart later sold it to a London financier who went spectacularly bust in 1875 and had to sell all his belongings, including the Maggini. The violin then passed through various hands until in 1906 it was sold to a buyer in Bulgaria named Stoiko Lalchev. He held on to it until 1920 when, in the aftermath of the First World War, he sold it to someone called Imre Borsos, in Oradea, Romania. The instrument then seems to have disappeared for the next sixty or so years, resurfacing at an auction in Zurich in 1984.’
‘Resurfacing from where?’ I asked.
‘The Soviet Union, it would appear. It was bought by a Swiss collector who held on to it until 1995 when he was found dead in Lake Thun after apparently falling from his sailing boat.’
‘Any suspicious circumstances?’
‘I gather there was a police investigation, but it concluded that the death was probably accidental.’
‘I see what you mean about it being unlucky,’ I said. ‘Two previous owners dead in unusual circumstances, then Forlani. I don’t think I’d want to acquire that fiddle.’
‘No,’ Rudy agreed. ‘It does have a somewhat chequered past.’
‘Anything else?’
‘That’s it. I hope it helps you.’
‘Thanks, Rudy.’
‘I have bad vibes about that violin. Sometimes it’s better to leave things well alone, you know.’
‘I’m just curious.’
‘Well, be careful, Gianni.’
13
Casale Monferrato is known as the cement capital of Italy. Need I say more? Actually, the title is rather unfair, for on a visit to the town there is nothing obvious to indicate its industrial status: no clouds of smoke over the suburbs, no looming factory chimneys, no coatings of limestone dust on trees and buildings. Rather it is a quiet, not unattractive little settlement on the banks of the Po, its centre dominated by a castle, one of the finest synagogues in Italy and innumerable elegant sixteenth-century palaces dating from the time when it was the fief of the Dukes of Mantua.
It was early evening when we arrived, but we didn’t linger. We headed south-west from Casale, along the road to Asti. The countryside was flat to start with, but very soon we were driving through low wooded hills, the red roofs of scattered farms, the tower of a church, half hidden in the trees. There were fields of maize beside the road and neat rows of vines higher up. This was wine country, home of the Barbera and the Nebbiolo grapes.
After twenty kilometres, we turned off the main road, over a level crossing, and began to climb into the hills, the road twisting between more fields of maize and vines. Through the open car windows came the scent of wood-smoke. We turned a corner and ahead of us, on the summit of a steep peak, we saw the Castello di Salabue, the ancestral home of Count Ignazio Alessandro Cozio di Salabue, the greatest, most celebrated collector of violins in history. The Castello – which was more a country villa than a true fortified castle – was illuminated in the setting sun, its stucco walls glowing pink and orange. Next to it, the bell tower of a church stood out clear against the powder-blue satin of the sky.
We drove through rusty iron gates and up a rough, winding drive fringed by trees. Beyond the edge of the drive the forested hillside dropped away steeply into the valley. The barking of dogs close by told us that our arrival had been noted.
It was the Weimaraners who came out to greet us first, three bouncing good-natured animals with sleek, shining coats. Behind them came a tall, bespectacled figure with a pipe clamped between his teeth.
‘Giovanni Davico,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘Welcome to Salabue.’
He led us through another gate and across a gravelled forecourt, the dogs bounding along beside us. We ascended a covered stone staircase to a terrace garden, then went through a door into the house.
‘I’ll show you around later,’ Giovanni said. ‘First, you must have a glass of wine.’
He took us into the library where his wife, Marie-Therese, was waiting with a tray of drinks.
‘From our own grapes,’ she said, handing out the glasses. ‘Nothing special, I’m afraid. Just an ordinary table wine.’
There were shelves of books on the walls – old leather-bound volumes which had seen better days – but the room was clearly a living room as much as a library. The centre of it was occupied by a long wooden dining table and at one side, in front of an open fire, were armchairs and settees, a coffee table overflowing with magazines and a television and video player on a wooden cabinet. Family photographs were spread around the bookcases and mantelpiece, the furniture and rugs on the stone floor were worn and well used. There was an air of comfortable dilapidation about the place – a historic house that was lived in, not just preserved for the guided tour.
We drank our wine around the hearth. One of the Weimaraners came and rested its head on my knee, waiting to be stroked. Giovanni called it away.
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I like dogs. These are handsome creatures.’
‘You keep dogs yourself?’ Marie-Therese asked.
‘No. They’re gun dogs, aren’t they? Do you hunt with them?’
‘These three? They’re too soft and pampered. They’d run a mile if they saw a wild boar.’
‘You have wild boar nearby?’ Guastafeste said.
‘In the woods. White gold too – truffles.’
‘They can sniff out truffles?’
‘No, the good truffle hounds are mostly mongrels. I wish they could. A truffle hound is worth a fortune around here.’
‘Or a pig,’ Giovanni said. ‘We had a pig once who could sniff out a truffle better than any dog. But he was hell to house train.’
I laughed and drank some of my wine.
‘You were too modest about this,’ I said. ‘It’s a little more than an ordinary table wine.’
‘It’s only Barbera,’ Marie-Therese said. ‘For the really good stuff – the Barolos and Barbarescos – you have to go closer to Alba.’
‘You have a lot of vines?’
‘Very few,’ Giovanni replied. ‘The land that once belonged to the house has mostly been sold off. We have only a small a
rea on the hill below the drive now. Enough for a few litres of wine for our own consumption, but no more.’
‘And in Count Cozio’s day?’
‘Things were different then. There was land, farms, a town house in Casale.’
‘The town house has gone?’
‘Long ago. Like the violins.’
I looked around the room. ‘Where did Cozio keep his violins? In here?’
‘I don’t know,’ Giovanni replied. ‘There seems to be no record of exactly where the collection was stored. The house is not big. Only four reception rooms. Perhaps he used more than one room.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’ll show you.’
We went out of the library into the adjoining room – a larger, more formal salon containing gilt-framed paintings, elegant gold furniture and an antique Pleyel grand piano. From there we continued into the dining room which had a huge faded mural of the surrounding countryside painted on to the walls.
‘Was this how it was in Cozio’s day?’ I asked.
Giovanni shook his head. ‘When Cozio died he left only a daughter, Matilda, who had no children. On her death, the house was inherited by the Marquis dalle Valle, one of my ancestors, who was related to Cozio’s wife. The estate then passed out of the family for many years, falling into ever greater disrepair until my parents managed to buy it back in 1935. It was virtually derelict, just a shell with holes in the walls and roof. My parents restored it. It was my mother who had these paintings done in the classical style.’
The fourth reception room – the darkest, gloomiest of all – was almost entirely taken up by a large billiards table. On one of the walls was a portrait of Count Cozio himself.
‘I’ve seen this in the Museo Stradivariano, in Cremona,’ I said.
‘The one in Cremona is the original,’ Giovanni said. ‘This is a photographic reproduction. It’s quite good, but it’s not the same as a painting. It has no texture, no depth to it.’
I moved closer to study the portrait. It showed the count as an old man, in white wig, wing collar, ruffled shirt, frock-coat and white bow-tie. His left hand was resting on the head of a walking stick. In his right hand, dangling down so that the surface was revealed, was a blank piece of white paper. There was something incongruous about the piece of paper – an expanse of plain white paint in the midst of all the fine detail of the count’s dress. Guastafeste noticed it too.
‘That’s strange,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t the artist paint something on the paper? It surely wouldn’t have been blank.’
‘It is a little odd,’ Giovanni conceded. ‘I don’t know the answer. Maybe it had something on it originally – the count’s name perhaps – and it was thought prudent to remove it. Piedmont was occupied by the French after the Revolution. It wasn’t wise to advertise your membership of the aristocracy.’
‘Did Cozio have trouble during the Revolution?’ I asked.
‘It would appear not. He kept his lands, and his head, which was something of an achievement. It doesn’t seem that he was hated by the locals in quite the way the French nobility were. Perhaps the piece of paper had “Citizen Cozio” inscribed on it and someone – some counterrevolutionary – later erased it. Who knows?’
‘Are any of Cozio’s papers still here?’ I said.
‘A few,’ Giovanni replied. ‘Most are in the Civic Library in Cremona. His Carteggio, the detailed descriptions of his violins, are certainly there, but you probably knew that already.’
I nodded. I’d read some of the Carteggio – not in the count’s original notes, but in the transcriptions the scholar Renzo Bacchetta made in the 1950s. They made dry, very dull reading, even for a luthier.
‘But you say there are some still here?’
‘Not a great number, and they are in a very poor condition.’
‘You’ve read them?’
‘I tried a couple and gave up. They’re very faded and Cozio’s handwriting was atrocious. I keep meaning to ask the museum in Cremona if they would like them, but I don’t think they’re very significant. All the important stuff was taken from here years ago. I’ll show you them in the morning.’
We had dinner in the dining room, our voices echoing around the high reaches of the ceiling. Marie-Therese had made agnolotti, plump little pasta half moons stuffed with meat – a local speciality – followed by pork and fresh fruit. Afterwards we took our glasses of Barbera back into the library. I wandered around the perimeter of the room, studying the paintings and photographs on the walls.
‘Was this a library when Cozio lived here?’
‘No one knows,’ Giovanni replied. ‘There are no records, no pictures of what it was like then.’
I took in the plain stucco walls, the high windows, the mosaic floor, imagining what the room must have been like two hundred years ago. Was this where Cozio had kept his fabulous collection of violins? Was the room big enough to accommodate them all? I pictured him here at his desk, writing by candlelight with a quill pen, one of his violins beside him as he measured its dimensions, as he recorded the details of its appearance for posterity.
Very little is known about Cozio. He inherited his title and the Salabue estate when he was a very young man and showed an already obsessive interest in violins from his late teens when he began commissioning instruments from Giovanni Guadagnini who was then an old man, living in Turin and struggling to make ends meet. The count was only twenty when he bought Stradivari’s last remaining dozen or so violins from Paolo Stradivari and for the next quarter of a century Cozio applied himself – as only an enthusiast of independent means could – to building and documenting an unsurpassed collection of instruments.
However, as with most passions, there came a time when his interest began to wane. At the end of the eighteenth century Piedmont was invaded by French, Russian and Austrian armies. When Cozio sent all his violins to the banker Carlo Carli in Milan for safekeeping perhaps that was the point when the fire of his enthusiasm started to die a little. With his precious violins out of sight he turned his attentions to other matters – to the collection of local history papers which he transcribed and catalogued with the same meticulous care he had once devoted to his violins.
There is no evidence that the violins ever came back to Salabue. We know that in 1817 Carlo Carli sold one of Cozio’s Stradivaris to Paganini, and we know that a number – including, ostensibly, the Messiah – were sold to Tarisio in 1827. But that still left a large number unaccounted for. The question that tormented me, gnawing away relentlessly at my mind, was: what happened to those other violins?
* * *
I shared a room with Guastafeste that night, down below the main part of the Castello in some old storage buildings that had been converted into a bedroom and bathroom.
I slept badly, kept awake by the noise of heavy rain on the roof and the incessant hooting of an owl in the woods. When I emerged next morning, Guastafeste still buried beneath his sheet, I found the hillside draped with thick mist, the houses and fields in the valley lost from sight. The ground was damp, the trees dripping. There was a ripe mustiness in the air, an earthy scent like the smell of rotting wood or mouldy mushrooms. I strolled out on to the terrace and met Giovanni coming back from walking the dogs. The Weimaraners – emerging like grey ghosts from the fog – were hot and panting. I could see the vapour rising from their velvety coats.
‘You’re up early,’ Giovanni said. ‘Would you like breakfast?’
‘I’ll wait for Antonio.’
‘Let me show you the church then. Cozio’s tomb.’
We went through a door at the far end of the courtyard and came out at the side of the church whose open bell tower was almost built into the walls of the Castello.
‘Was this Cozio’s private chapel?’ I asked.
‘No, it’s always been the village church. But the family has had strong links with it for centuries.’
The main doors of the church were open. One or two people were drifting inside, exchanging greetings.
‘
Is there a service?’ I asked.
‘Early morning Mass. But not for ten minutes. Come in, no one will mind.’
I followed him into the church. It was a small, very simple place of worship – just a handful of pews in the nave, no transepts to speak of. The main altar was marble and gold, but on the left was another much plainer altar, next to which was a marble headstone embedded in the wall of the church. The inscription on the headstone was in Latin, the name and date standing out as if they’d been freshly carved: Ignazio Alessandro Cozio di Salabue, December 15, 1840.
I gazed at the modest, unadorned tomb for a long time, wondering about Cozio, about his violins, about the secrets he had taken with him when he died.
* * *
The papers were in a cardboard box-file in Marie-Therese’s office in one of the turrets of the Castello. They were yellowing and fragile, stained so badly by damp and mould that the writing on them was almost impossible to read.
‘You see what I mean?’ Giovanni said. ‘There’s not much you can do with them.’
I spread the documents out on the desk and leafed through them anyway, examining each one in turn in case there were a few legible passages, then passing them across to Guastafeste for a second opinion.
‘Where did you find them?’ I asked.
‘In the basement,’ Giovanni said. ‘There’s an underground chamber beneath a wooden trapdoor. My wife calls it a dungeon, but I think it was most probably used as an ice house in the past. They were dumped in a corner under a pile of junk. Some were just blackened pulp. We had to throw most of them away.’
‘So this is all that was left?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘There are no unexplored nooks and crannies in the Castello? No secret hiding places?’ Guastafeste asked hopefully.
‘If there were, we would have found them. I’ve been over every part of the house and all the outbuildings.’
‘What about Casale?’ I said. ‘Are there any papers in the archives there?’
Giovanni shrugged. ‘There may be. I’ve never looked.’ He lit up his pipe and sucked on the mouthpiece, smoke leaking out between his lips.
