Palladian Days (14 page)

“We need a booklet about the villa to sell to tourists,” I report to Carl by telephone from Piombino Dese. Carl will be coming later, for the few weeks he can get away from business. In the meanwhile, we invest in daily phone calls. “I'm getting requests regularly,” I tell him. “For a booklet and for postcards.”

“Okay,” Carl quickly responds. “Why don't you write one and we'll have it printed up.”

“That's not what I had in mind,” I say. Carl knows perfectly well that it is not what I had in mind. We compromise. I prepare a draft and fax it to Carl's office, using Wilma Scquizzato's fax machine. Carl produces the final version, beginning:

Preparing the booklet is a useful exercise for both of us. It forces us to take stock of exactly what we do and don't know about our villa. Still relying primarily on Doug Lewis's unpublished manuscript and the published articles he derived from it, we begin to distill the aspects of the villa that are most meaningful to us.

We are intrigued, for example, that we are only the sixth family to own the villa in four and a half centuries. The Cornaro family held on to it through successive generations for 253 years. Caterino Antonio Cornaro, the last Cornaro owner of the villa and the last male descendant in his branch of the family, died in 1802, just five years after the death of the Republic of Venice at the hands of Napoleon. Other branches of the family died out through the years also, until today, I'm told, there are no Cornaros left in the Veneto. The richest and one of the most powerful families of Venice has disappeared as completely as the republic it served for more than a millennium.

That is how an actor and orator known as II Ruzzante (The Rustic) apostrophized the Cornaros in 1521. The two most famous women in the history of Venice are both Cornaros: Caterina Cornaro reigned as queen of Cyprus from 1468 to 1489 as a result of the family's deep involvement in that island kingdom; Elena Lucrezia Cornaro became, in 1678, the first woman in European history to earn a university degree. When evidence emerged of a coup planned by a doge of Venice in 1355, the top government leaders met at the home of a Cornaro—a future doge himself—to plan their response; when the Venetian military leader Carmagnola was executed in 1432 as a suspected traitor in the wars with Milan, a Cornaro was sent to command the Venetian forces. Giorgio Cornaro himself, who built our villa, died fighting the Ottoman Turks in the epic sea battle at Lepanto in 1571. A later owner of the
villa, Caterino Domenico Cornaro, died in 1669 while commanding Venice's defense of Crete against the Turkish siege.

All that wealth, power, and fame finally vaporized, the goods of the Cornaros dispersed around the globe. Titian's portrait of Giorgio Cornaro at age twenty hangs in the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha; Giovanni Bellini's Cornaro-commissioned
Continence of Scipio
is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Andrea Mantegna's
Cult of Cybele
is at the National Gallery in London. The Pitti Palace in Florence holds Tintoretto's portrait of Alvise Cornaro. Titian's portrait of Queen Caterina Cornaro is at the Uffizi in Florence, and Gentile Bellini's at the Szepmüveszeti in Budapest. A missal, or prayer book, of one of the Cornaro cardinals—there were nine in all—was recently auctioned at Christie's in London for $4.46 million. The Grand Canal of Venice is studded with at least nine former Cornaro palaces, housing the
municipio
of Venice, police headquarters, the Venice Biennale administration, a hotel, the headquarters of a prestigious textile company, and a miscellany of other owners and tenants. And in the Cornaros’ Palladian palace at Piombino Dese resides the family of a former church music director from Atlanta.

When the last Cornaro in Giorgio Cornaro's line of male descendants died in 1802, six of his cousins inherited Villa Cornaro. They sold the Piombino Dese property five years later to the Carminati-Torri family, who held it for 112 years. Then, for some reason that history does not record, Carlo Emo-Capodilista, whose brother already owned Villa Emo at Fanzolo, acquired Villa Cornaro in 1919, gaining his family the brief distinction of owning two Palladian villas at the same time. Count Emo retained Villa Cornaro for just two years, though that was time enough for him to auction its furniture at Sotheby's in New York.

Mario Vianello, a Venetian shipowner and coffee importer, succeeded the count. One of Vianello's daughters, Elena, visits us at the villa one spring day. She cheerily entertains us with stories of
her childhood at the villa. Her most fearsome tale is an account of how she rode her bicycle indoors in the grand salon, careening about the original terra-cotta tiles in the shadow of Camillo Mari-ani's six Renaissance statues.

She visits a second time, bringing her mother, Bianca, Mario Vianello's widow, and a worn and faded photo album showing the family's days at the villa. Bianca tells us how her husband died of appendicitis in 1942 while serving as a soldier in World War II. His complaints of pain were ignored, on the theory that he was just trying to avoid combat.

Mario's brother Tito did not show Mario's business acumen in the postwar years, although even Mario might have been unable to cope with the challenges of those desperately poor times. In 1951 Tito bailed out, selling Villa Cornaro with all its fields and farm buildings to the parish church.

Why would a parish church want a Palladian estate? To run an
asilo
(kindergarten), of course!

The fields of the villa were sold off to the farm families who had cultivated them in the past. The
barchessa
on the west flank, designed by Palladio's follower Vincenzo Scamozzi and built about 1590 (on the foundations of an earlier building), was chopped up into shops with apartments above and sold to merchant families. The dirt of a small hill to the south, created to shelter the villa's icehouse, was carted to fill the lake that had stood south of the villa for at least 250 years. The seven-arch bridge was left spanning a broad, stone-lined mudhole that survives today.

To organize the villa itself as an
asilo
, the church made certain adjustments. The heating system was removed and replaced by several wood-burning stoves. Outdoor privies were erected in a row leading from the villa's west wall.

The villa's frescos and spectacular plasterwork were identified as problems. True, the Mattia Bortoloni frescos, then 234 years old, are devoted exclusively to Bible stories—Old Testament on the first floor, New Testament above—but one panel, portraying
Noah's flood, depicts a wholly unacceptable and potentially mind-scarring female rump. Whitewash solved that problem. The little plaster angels—putti—that spring in three dimensions above the interior doorways offered a more sinister threat. At least half of them possessed clearly discernible penises. Who can imagine the horror that such a sight might wreak upon the youngsters who would attend the
asilo
, not to mention the sensibilities of the nuns who would operate it? The penises had to go. Today the putti display only rough, curious stumps as evidence of their former masculinity.
Note to diary: Search attic for stack of discarded plaster penises
.

Two farmworkers in the early twentieth century cross the villa's seven-arch bridge on a donkey cart

Was the villa's life as a kindergarten a Babylonian Captivity? Or should it be seen as a protective custody, a sheltering transition until stronger hands arrived to renew it? The best answer is probably neither.

Giacomo is alarmed when he first sees the Italian edition of the
booklet that Carl and I produce for tourists. “Don Aldo will be upset,” he counsels.

The
asilo
, or kindergarten, run by the parish at Villa Cornaro in the 1950s

That is the sentence that alarms Giacomo. Carl tries to placate him and provide a line of defense in case the criticism that Giacomo anticipates from Don Aldo actually materializes.

“It only says a ‘difficult’ period,” Carl protests. “And the sentence refers to both the kindergarten period and the period when the villa was abandoned.”

In any event, we have a closet filled with three thousand booklets in Italian and three thousand in English, so the villa's eight years as a kindergarten and twelve years as an abandoned structure will have to remain “difficult” until we can sell them.

I can think of three positive aspects of the church's ownership. First, it may have saved the villa from a worse fate. For me, the saddest
villas are the ones owned by local or regional governments and used as offices or for occasional conferences. All of Palladio seems drained from them, leaving them with the air of a rundown hotel conference center. Routine maintenance is largely abandoned in favor of periodic restoration campaigns. Second, a generation of Piombino Dese residents, now in their late forties or fifties, feel an attachment to the villa because of the time they attended kindergarten here. They delight in telling me stories of their youthful hijinks at the villa. Their tales give me the willies, but I appreciate the bond they continue to feel with the villa.

Finally, by selling off the fields and
harchessa
, the church reduced the estate to a more manageable economic unit. I would delight in seeing the villa preserved to its full glorious extent of yesteryear. Deep inside, however, I realize that if the villa property had not been reduced, Carl and I could not have afforded it. Many of those who could afford it would be discouraged by the management and maintenance challenges of such a grand property. So I have decided that, though the years were “difficult,” the period produced beneficial results.

On the other hand, the lake should have been left alone!

Our second spring at Villa Cornaro brings a big change and our first major financial challenge.

The change is personal: Carl decides to take a sabbatical from the business world. He resigns his corporate posts and joins the unemployed. For the first time we can look forward to May and June together in the Veneto, followed by two more months in September and October. For the year or so of Carl's sabbatical I will not find myself occasionally feeling lonely in the evening.

On the other hand, my progress in speaking Italian slows
abruptly. Except in our most diligent and ambitious moments, Carl and I speak English with each other at the villa. When in Piombino Dese by myself, I am totally immersed in Italian. It is a matter of speaking Italian or nothing at all. Because Carl is never alone at the villa, he hasn't had my motivation for improving his Italian, which might be described euphemistically as “less advanced.”

“The technical term is ‘stinks,’ “ Carl suggests.

When the Battistons or Scquizzatos or others organize dinner parties, or when we reciprocate, Carl gamely, though haltingly, joins in conversations about business or current events, but he has little to offer when talk turns to children or shopping. Needless to say, he is entirely silent on cooking and recipes. On balance, it leaves him a very quiet dinner partner, although he maintains a nice smile and no one seems to mind. Memi, for one, takes Carl as a personal challenge. With his usual exuberance, he leads Carl out through his extensive
orto
(fruit and vegetable garden), cheerily pointing out all his many varieties of every crop known to man. Who cares if the words he is teaching Carl are at least half Venetan instead of Italian?