Palladian Days (18 page)

During cool September nights, special white mushrooms sprout at the foot of the Lombardy poplars that line the east and west sides of our villa's park. They lie like little handkerchiefs that capricious fairies might have dropped silently in the night. Mushrooms from a grocery are delicious; I joyfully devour them whether tiny, tall, or stringy, gray or black, raw, fried, or sauteed. On the other hand, a mushroom in the outdoors is a fungus of no more value to me than mildew in my closet. As a result, I am slow to appreciate the passions unleashed by the intermittent arrival of
pioppini
in our park.

In fact, the recurrent fungus growth at the base of our poplars proves to be a phenomenon known in wide circles of Piombinesi, the way you would know that a vein of gold runs through your neighbor's property or that your neighbor's field has a corner rich in truffles.
Pioppini
, I am to learn, are prized as an exotic and savory addition to risotto or stew.

After opening the shutters of the villa one morning, Silvana joins me in the kitchen, where I am munching my usual brioche for breakfast and picking my way through yesterday's newspaper. My morning chats with Silvana are a highlight of my day.

“Have you noticed the
funghi
that have sprung up at the poplars?” Silvana asks.

I have indeed noticed them. In fact, I have assumed that they are a new symptom of the old age and general bad health of the poplars, which are nearing the end of their normal life span.

“Will you be gathering them?” she continues.

“I view collecting mushrooms the way I view Russian roulette,” I try to explain, though the vocabulary is beyond my abilities. Given a choice among nine delicious
funghi
and a single poisonous one, I am sure I would select the killer.

“In that case, may Giacomo and I gather them?” Silvana asks. She explains to me the flavorful qualities of
pioppini
.

“Sono tuoil
They're yours!” I quickly assure her. Late in the evening she returns to the park with Giacomo. Together they collect several large paper-bagfuls of the mushrooms.

Several weeks later a new crop of mushrooms appears, as abundant as the first. Alas, when she and Giacomo arrive in the evening to harvest them, the mushrooms have entirely vanished, every one of them. Silvana discloses the mysterious disappearance to me somewhat cautiously the next morning. She may wonder if I have changed my mind, now that I know more about the delectable crop. Perhaps I have secreted the mushrooms away myself. She avoids saying that the mushrooms have been stolen, contenting herself with the observation that they have been “taken.”

“How could anyone have entered the park to get them?” I wonder aloud. “The gates are always locked.”

“Non lo so
. I do not know,” Silvana replies, with the gravity that Charlie Chan would bring to a perplexing murder investigation. “But they are all gone.”

In our early years at Villa Cornaro, our electrician Giancarlo is a frequent visitor as we try to understand and simplify the burglar alarm system and intercom, change the older Italian electrical outlets for others that meet the new European Union standard, and upgrade some of the indirect fluorescent lighting fixtures.

Giancarlo arrives one morning to complete another assignment. He is a small man, with a long nose, bristly mustache, recessed chin, and twinkly eyes. As usual, he brings two helpers with him, ensuring that no job will be a small undertaking. When the task is completed, I say good-bye and unlock the south door of the villa for them to leave. Within several minutes I realize I have left my
keys on the central table of the grand salon and walk back to retrieve them. Through the large windows facing south, I witness a scene like a druid ritual. Giancarlo and his assistants are scurrying around the poplars, bending and weaving in quasiballetic moves, dancing rapidly from tree to tree as they scoop up the latest growth of mushrooms. Within minutes their work is accomplished. They dash to their panel truck parked beyond the west gate and speed away.

“Ah, so,” I murmur.

Carl claims the worst paper he ever wrote in college was the only one that he wrote earlier than the night before it was due. That has given him a nice rationale in life for completing things at the last minute, which offends my own compulsive nature. Carl is unrepentant.

“It was only the
writing
that I left for the last minute,” he protests. “I
thought about
the subject for weeks.”

Whatever, I say to myself, perhaps rolling my eyes so he won't think I'm completely taken in by such sophistry.

Now even Carl admits he is under the gun. He has rashly agreed to give a lecture on Palladio and his villas for the Harvard Club of Georgia. Just thinking about it in advance won't suffice. There is research to be done; there are slides to be taken, retaken, and sorted.

I think he actually enjoys the incentive it gives him to digest all we have been reading, combine it with our own experience, and develop his own Palladian synthesis. Carl and I are both book junkies. For years we have been buying every book we find on Palladio or villas of the Veneto, most books on Venice, and many on Italy. At least once a year we have to reorganize our bookcases in
Atlanta to expand the Italy section. Detective thrillers are the first to go, boxed and put in a closet. Plays we banish to shelves in the guest bedroom. Philosophy and sociology we push to shelves so high no one can read the titles, much less reach them. Only Carl knows why we don't “deaccession” some of these books that we will never read again. (Not my college lit books, of course; I may get back to those someday.)

The first authority on Palladio is the man himself. In 1570 he published
The Four Books of Architecture
, which undoubtedly is one of the most influential books ever written on the subject.
Four Books
was a sensation, translated into dozens of languages and remaining in print almost continuously for over four hundred years. The success is not just testimony to his architecture. In
Four Books
Palladio cleverly produced a true how-to guide. The book is illustrated with meticulously prepared woodcuts depicting both Palladio's own structures and classical buildings that he drew and measured in Rome. The drawings of his own work are shown in elevation and floor plan with all the key dimensions marked. Most important, whereas Michelangelo and Raphael seem to have produced beautiful Renaissance buildings instinctively, Palladio distilled a series of clear, transferable rules that less skilled architects could follow in designing their own buildings on different terrain for patrons with different needs. How much space should be left between the columns of a portico?
Two and one-quarter times the diameter of the columns is best
. How tall should an Ionic column be?
Including capital and base, nine times its diameter
. Corinthian columns?
Five and one-half times
.

Some of the modern books on Palladio are disappointing, basically just photo albums of the villas, full of angles, shadows, and sunsets, and with a preface that gives a nod to scholarship by rehashing a few truisms. Carl thinks the most useful and accessible book is Robert Tavernor's
Palladio and Palladianism
, a relatively short work still available in paperback.

The booklet that Carl and I prepared in our first year to sell to tourists refers to the “internal harmony and balance” that Palladio
brought to his villas. In fact, although we can feel the calm of the villa, we don't really understand what creates it. We set about trying to learn more, turning first to
Four Books
. Palladio begins Book II by saying that in a private home the parts must “correspond to the whole and to each other.” But what does that actually mean in looking at Villa Cornaro?

Floor plan of Villa Cornaro's lower
piano nobile
, with frescoed rooms identified by the principal theme

Obviously, the east half of the villa is reproduced in mirror image on the west. Palladio is always symmetrical. But he must have something more than symmetry in mind. Carl notes right away that the center, or core, of the villa—that is, without the east and west wings—is close to a square, which Palladio cites in
Four Books
as a preferred shape. Of course, the Tower of Babel and Egypt rooms—we refer to the frescoed rooms by the themes of their major frescos—are also square, but we can't make much of that, so
we keep looking. We also see that the seven rooms of the core, together with the entrance hall, make up a rectangle with the long side equal to one and one-half times the short side—another of Palladio's preferred shapes. Concentrating on this rectangle, the core living area, we begin to make progress. We notice that the Babel and Jacob rooms together are the same size as the Noah room.

Villa Cornaro's lower
piano nobile
, with Palladio's six repetitions of the “module” highlighted

That pulls those rooms into a pattern but still does not account for the grand salon. We start thinking of the Noah room as a module for the villa design. This leads to our breakthrough: the grand salon, we realize, is equivalent to two of the modules (that is, two Noah rooms) placed side by side. What an epiphany! We feel like code breakers, because we have puzzled out a consistent pattern running through the core living area of the villa, a pattern dramatically
illustrating Palladio's stated principle of having the parts of a home “correspond to the whole and to each other.”

Still we are left without an explanation for the two wings standing to the east and to the west, that is, the guest bedroom and the kitchen. In fact, we learn that those two wings were probably not built in 1552-1554 with the rest of the villa. Doug Lewis has concluded that the wings were probably not finished until a second building campaign after 1588. For Carl and me, this seems to open a bizarre possibility perhaps not considered by Doug or other scholars who have written about the villa: maybe the wings were not part of Palladio's original 1551 design.
Four Books
, which depicts Villa Cornaro complete with wings, was not published until nineteen years later—plenty of time for Palladio to add the wings to his drawing in order to show his readers how the villa
could have
looked if it were not built on such a narrow site. Interesting thought, but how would we explain the fact that the wings are actually there, just as they are shown in
Four Books?
Well, maybe Giorgio Cornaro, when he saw Palladio's new drawing, decided he liked the wings and would add them on to his villa even though it was a tight squeeze. But then Giorgio Cornaro died just one year after
Four Books
was published, leaving it to his son Girolamo to finish the project.

Maybe it is all far-fetched. In any case, it keeps Carl and me entertained for weeks, discussing the possibilities, combing through our books, and inspecting brick patterns in the stairwells for clues to what was built later.

We are still left with a big puzzle: How did Palladio decide on the dimensions of the module that he repeated throughout the villa?

At this point Carl and I learn that measuring a villa is not as easy as it sounds. First, we find that opposite walls are not always parallel. You may get one dimension if you measure along one side of a room and a different one if you measure along the other side. Second, there is the problem of deciding what unit of measurement to use. You can't use meters as Italians do today; the metric system
was not developed until some two hundred years later. In
Four Books
Palladio always speaks in terms of the Vicentine foot, which was the unit of measurement in the province of Vicenza, where he lived. He even includes a woodcut illustration of a line equal in length to half a Vicentine foot. This really confounds our measurements for a while. No matter how many times we do the conversion, the actual dimensions in our villa are nowhere near round multiples of the Vicentine foot shown in
Four Books
.