Palladian Days (16 page)

There are three obvious candidates. First is Mario Formentin, the man on whom Dick Rush always relied for projects at the villa. Mario is the brother of Ernesto Formentin, the
geometra
who is our engineer on the project. The second possibility is Angelo Mar-conato, a longtime employee of Mario who broke away to set up his own firm a few years earlier. Angelo has performed two small tasks for us at the villa, but I had not realized that he did big roofing jobs as well. Then I learned that he recently finished reroofing the local church—a roof even bigger than the villa's and requiring the same old-style tiles. The third candidate is the one we know best, Franco Ferraro. Franco is the father of Lorella, the promising young ballerina who so impressed us in the recital at the villa the previous year.

Carl and I meet with each of them and discuss the work. They all
agree that, because of the weather, work during the winter is not feasible. We must look to the following spring to begin.

Soon their
preventivi
(estimates) begin to arrive. The estimates vary widely; the lowest is 50 percent higher than we expected and the highest is 50 percent higher than that. One submits a very professional
preventive
and is completely out of our price range. Another is low bidder, but we notice immediately that he has omitted one important cost item that both of the others have included. We assume that the missing item will not be overlooked when it comes time to pay, which means that the estimate, which had originally seemed attractive, was only slightly better than Angelo's, the middle bid. We worry that there might be other overlooked items in the low bid that we have failed to catch. We are also reminded that Angelo is the only one of the three with whom we have had actual experience, and that the work he did—albeit a small job— was professional and timely. We give Angelo the nod.

We arrive in Piombino Dese on May 1 the following spring expecting to see the villa cloaked in scaffolding. The only sign of activity as we pull into the yard is Ilario driving our immense lawn mower in long sweeps around the broad south lawn, now unencumbered by excess cypresses.

Where is Angelo? I phone him immediately and he appears at our door early the next morning.

“Why haven't you begun?” I ask excitedly.

“May is too rainy,” Angelo replies calmly. “We will begin in June.”

“The comedy begins,” Carl mutters to me in English.

“When in June will you begin?” Carl asks.

Angelo pulls from his pocket a small diary and flips its pages. “Wednesday, June 3,” he responds carefully.

Later Carl and I review the conversation. “At least he didn't just say ‘early June,’ “ Carl observes.

“You're grasping at straws,” I reply.

All is quiet until Tuesday, June 2. The bell at the street rings
while we are sitting at breakfast. Angelo is at the front gate. He asks us to unlock the service gate to the west so he can pull his truck in. Soon he and three others are unloading large frames of scaffolding from the truck and assembling them along the north facade of the villa, where their roofing work is to begin. “Why are you a day early?” I ask. He said he would begin work on June 3, he explains. You can't begin work if you don't have your scaffolding in place.

Carl and I look at each other in some puzzlement. We seem to have found a new life-form: an entirely reliable builder.

Angelo is a man in his early fifties, with weathered skin. He has an average build and an ambling gait that suggests muscles accustomed to being sore from hard manual labor. The three young men who climb down from the truck and set to work with him would be finalists in an Angelo Marconato look-alike contest, except that they are a generation younger and half a head taller, and seem carved from steel.

“My sons,” Angelo says, pointing to each of them in turn. “Stefano, Paolo, and Fabiano.”

They are on the roof from morning to night, pausing only for
riposo
in the early afternoon. They appear five days a week without fail. We watch as their work moves in sectors across the broad roof.

They work to salvage as many of the old handmade
tegole
as possible, because the new replacement tiles are machine-made and have a different profile, at least on close inspection. I'm not sure that with a roof as high as the villa's, the difference is perceptible from the ground. Nonetheless, Angelo appears one morning with Ernesto Formentin to make a special request. They are concerned that the machine-made tile will be noticeable along the ridgeline. They request authority to incur the extra cost for handmade tiles to install there. Carl reluctantly agrees.

We return to Atlanta for July and August, confident that we have left the villa in conscientious hands. The following weekend, July Fourth, Ashley flies down from Washington, D.C., to welcome us home and get updated on our stay in Italy. She has just completed
her first year at law school and is working for the summer at a Washington law firm. She is primed to ply us with confidence-building questions:

“Who is this Angelo?”

“If the villa collapses, do you sue here or in Italy?”

A few weeks later, alarming news arrives from Ernesto, faxed along with more of his meticulous drawings. Angelo has discovered a serious structural problem.

A previously undetected leak in the roof beside the south portico has been dumping rainwater onto two important beams. One of them, a roof beam, is rotten beyond repair. Fortunately, it can be accessed and replaced easily from above while the roof tiles are removed. The second beam is much trickier. As I try to understand the problem, I learn more than I ever thought I'd need to know about how a Palladian villa was built. Ernesto's drawings show that the second-floor columns are joined together by an enormous beam laid across the tops of their capitals. Architects call that beam an architrave. The architraves at Villa Cornaro are covered in
intonaco
, just like the rest of the exterior. Underneath the
intonaco
, however, is not brick—as in the walls of the structure—or stone, but wood. The entire architrave is a big wooden beam. Plain straw is tacked to the beam and the
intonaco
applied on top. The straw acts as a lath to provide a good bond between the beam and the stucco. I marvel that this wood, straw, and stucco sandwich has survived almost 450 years, supporting an entablature and pediment that weigh tons.

Ernesto tells us that the hidden leak Angelo found has allowed water to seep under the
intonaco
and weaken one end of the architrave. Angelo has removed the
intonaco
along the full length of the architrave to inspect the whole beam. The damage is confined to just five feet at the west end. Faxes and phone calls fly back and forth between us and Ernesto. He reassures us: Angelo will simply remove the weakened part of the beam and splice a new segment in its place. The Soprintendente's office has already approved the remedy.

My mind reels trying to imagine how all the weight above will
be supported—more than seventy feet in the air—while the new beam is inserted. Carl says we should think of it like sausage making: something we don't want to know too much about.

Is Angelo qualified to do the work? we ask—perhaps an impolitic question. After all, we first met Angelo just two years earlier while he was installing kitchen tile.

“Of course,” Ernesto responds. Carl and I discuss our options and decide there aren't any. We authorize Angelo to proceed, realizing that we have no idea what the work will cost, and no insurance coverage if the whole facade collapses into a heap of rubble while the repair is in progress.

Silence. Weeks pass with no further report. We warily check our fax machine each morning.

“If anything went wrong, they would have told us,” Carl reassures me. His voice has no conviction. Finally, I telephone Ernesto.

“Oh, that was finished two weeks ago,” he responds casually.
“Nessun problema.”
He seems surprised that I felt any anxiety about something so routine.

Ernesto has a new suggestion. While the scaffolding is in place, we should ask a restoration firm based in Padua to examine the Corinthian capitals at the top of the second-floor columns and make us a proposal for restoring them. The Corinthian capitals on the south facade of the villa are, we are reminded, atypically made of terra-cotta. Although stone would have been more durable, Pal-ladio chose terra-cotta because it could be worked into more delicate foliage shapes at lower cost.

Carl and I agree to Ernesto's suggestion only after repeated assurances that the Padua firm will not charge for the evaluation.

September brings us back to Piombino Dese with great trepidation for our villa and our bank account. The villa, we quickly determine, is in great repair. The new roof is completed, although the scaffolding still embraces the south facade of the villa while the architrave is being re-stuccoed.

Ernesto arranges for the two principals from the Padua restoration
firm to visit one morning. Together with Angelo, who joins us, we clamber up a long series of carefully secured ladders to a scaffolding deck at the level of the capitals. The second-floor porch is a distant thirty feet below us. At close range I perceive that the capitals—which seem of modest size when viewed from below—are nearly as tall as I am. The terra-cotta curlicues are more intricate and fragile than I imagined them to be from a distance.

“These capitals are like four-hundred-fifty-year-old flowerpots,” Carl comments.

The restorers show us the damage to some of them and tell us how they would stabilize and repair them. They leave behind with us a detailed proposal, including convincing before-and-after photographs of similar jobs they have done in the past. Their price for the work is reasonable. In fact, there is only one argument against retaining them immediately, while the scaffolding is still in place: We can't afford it.

We've found that the unforeseen repairs will add 50 percent to the original estimated cost of the roof project. In light of the extra work required, it seems a bargain—a costly bargain.

Piombino Dese families are bound in a sense of dynasty. Businesses pass down through generations within a family. Remo Roncato, the furniture manufacturer and retailer we consulted about our kitchen, began by training with his father as a woodworker. My friend Marina Bighin, who runs a beauty shop in the former
barchessa
of the villa, is the daughter of a barber. When Mario, our plumber, arrives to make repairs, he is accompanied by his tall, handsome son Stefano, who is learning the trade. Ernesto For-mentin, our
geometra
, is struggling to transfer his clientele to his son Carlo. Franco Battiston, with his wife, Patrizia, is in charge of
the
supermercato
when his parents Gianni and Bianca travel on their increasingly frequent holidays.

This provides a strong continuity in the community, but at a cost to the other young people, those whose parents do not own a business. No employee of the
supermercato
who is not a Battiston is so deluded as to believe that his career might lead to his heading the enterprise. No plant foreman at the Roncato factory, regardless of his aptitude or energy, will rise to become chief executive.

A young friend tells me of a contemporary who has foolishly trained at the university as a pharmacist. “It is impossible to find work as a pharmacist. Of course, the pharmacy in Piombino Dese hires only members of the family,” she explains.

“Why not open a new pharmacy?” I ask.

“Impossible,” she says. “Only one pharmacy license is issued in a town the size of Piombino Dese. The same is true in towns nearby.” So the pharmacist-trained friend is unemployed and searching for other work.

Yet the entrepreneurial spirit flourishes. More than fifty lamp manufacturers around Piombino Dese, all small and family-owned, have sprung directly or indirectly from a single lamp factory that moved to Piombino Dese from Venice's Giudecca in the mid-1950s. Some employees left that plant to begin their own business, and the process was repeated again and again with lamp plants springing up like oversize mushrooms. Silvana's uncle Nazzareno Mason invites Carl and me to visit his small plant in Ronchi, a village within the
comune
of Piombino Dese. The factory, built beside his house, is a solid structure the size of about four basketball courts. Nazzareno handles purchasing and sales, embarking on long trips to visit his distributors and dealers in northern and eastern Europe. He has important customers in Japan as well, but in that case it is the customer who must travel to Piombino Dese. Nazzareno's wife, Danila, is in charge of shipping. Nazzareno takes us through the manufacturing area, dominated by a long, wide assembly table. Standing at one end, content to be in the midst of her family, is Nazzareno's eighty-eight-year-old mother. I am not sure she is
doing much assembling, but she is cheerfully convinced that she remains a contributing member of the family enterprise. Luca, the son of Nazzareno and Danila, works across the table from his grandmother. To our surprise, Carl and I spot two familiar faces farther along the table: Ilario Mariotto's older daughter, Alessan-dra, and her fiance, Stefano. I did not realize they were employed by Nazzareno.

“Complimenti,”
Carl says to Nazzareno. Business must be very strong to be hiring workers from outside the family!

Nazzareno never attended university; he moved directly from secondary school to work in the pioneer lamp factory that moved from Venice. Now he heads his own multinational business, surrounded by a multigenerational family and a few close friends, all within seventy-five yards of his own bed.

Like Nazzareno, Giacomo Miolo grew up in a family with no business to pass along. As the youngest of nine children, eight of them sons, Giacomo would not have found a place in the family business even if there had been one; few small businesses can support eight owners. In the desperate postwar years, Giacomo's family sometimes had trouble finding enough food for their table.

“Thankfully, a stream passed in front of our house,” Giacomo told me one day. “When we didn't have enough else to eat, my father would catch a fish or a few eels. God fed us and we never went hungry.”