Palladian Days (22 page)

The alternatives are clear and I review them with Helen. They can spend the night in Milan and return tomorrow morning, or they can catch a late train back to Mestre, although the train will arrive in Mestre too late for the last connection to Piombino Dese. Helen and I think alike: Better to get the difficult part over with now and then relax tomorrow. We agree that she and Bill will board the next
diretto
to Mestre, no matter the hour, and call me when they arrive; I will drive to Mestre and pick them up. In fact, being unsure of the road to the Mestre
stazione
and understanding that a
woman in that area alone at night is presumed to be there on business, I walk across Via Roma to the Caffe Palladio to beg Giacomo to make the drive with me when Helen's call arrives. Of course, I don't have to beg; Giacomo is happy to help.

Helen's call from Mestre comes at midnight; Giacomo and I meet them in front of McDonald's at the Mestre
stazione
at 12:30 a.m. Never has a face looked so relieved as Helen's when she spies our approaching car. Bill looks happy as well.

The following morning Helen sends a huge bouquet of flowers to Giacomo with a sweet note. He says it is the first time in his life he's been given flowers. (Silvana tells him once is enough.)

Andy, a college classmate of ours, arrives bearing a large Smithfield ham and a package of special Virginia long-grain rice. They are an unusual challenge to the land of prosciutto and risotto. In fact, the ham spices up our fresh eggs every morning for a week in a way that sweet, mild prosciutto never would. I serve thin slices to Italian guests for Sunday's farewell dinner to Andy, draping them over a bed of ripe, white pear slices as an antipasto. Everyone relishes its sharp taste and firm texture as a contrast to prosciutto; every shred vanishes swiftly from the table. I prepare Andy's rice in an American fashion, with chopped onions, shredded carrots, fresh parsley, a touch of soy sauce and Lowry's salt—but without the southern-style gravy that Carl's mother would have insisted on. Again the Italians consume it with interest, because its texture and taste are quite distinct from their own
riso
.

Andy, bless his soul, enthusiastically gets to work in the kitchen and, at the same time, regales us with tales of former classmates. Since Carl generally limits his kitchen work to pulling wine corks, Andy's bad example makes him ill at ease.

“Sally, this is fabulous, just fabulous!” Our Atlanta friend Joe, who was my first boss when Carl and I moved to Atlanta years ago, is standing in our dining room at the west end of the long mahogany table. He has discovered that from this single point he has an uninterrupted
view in four directions. He points to the east wall, seen in the distance through the entrance hall, the east salon, and the guest bedroom; to the west wall at the end of the kitchen; to the open window of the north wall just behind him; to the south wall through the Tower of Babel and Jacob's Ladder rooms.
“I
can see into every room. No wonder you're not afraid to be here alone; you can see if you have any unexpected visitors!”

Well, almost. The doorways of the five rooms along the north wall align perfectly. Guests in the east bedroom can look straight through to the kitchen in the morning to see if I'm up and preparing breakfast. I love this openness, this directness.

A young woman who has just completed her dissertation at the University of Venice on the iconography of the villa's frescos and stuccos arrives to present Carl and me with a copy of her thesis and thank us for the access we gave her to study and photograph the villa. Joe is so intrigued by everything that he excitedly sits in with us for the visit, even though the conversation is entirely in Italian and he doesn't speak a word of it. Afterward, he is fascinated as Carl explains that our friend Doug Lewis disagrees with the young Italian laureate's identification of the persons depicted in two of the statues in the grand salon.

Joe and his wife Barbara wander for hours through the villa, absorbing its dimensions, its colors, its presence. They have studied Palladio's life and works before arriving in Italy, and their enthusiastic delight in the villa renews our own.

Some houseguests, unlike our friends Joe and Barbara, have no real interest in Venice's history or the history of the villa but are enamored of other facets of Italian life. We see ordinary sights freshly through their eyes.

Bill, another college classmate, and his wife, Alice, are artists; she is a New York-based sculptor and landscape designer of considerable renown. Early in their stay with us at Villa Cornaro we take them to the celebrated Tomba Brion (Brion Tomb) at San Vito near Altivole, just fifteen miles north of Piombino Dese. Carl and I talk
Venetian history as we drive, but our guests’ attention is elsewhere. They busy themselves pointing out unusual trees, interesting patterns in pavements we pass, and quaintly decrepit farm buildings. They remark on the cultivation of every single square meter of land, on the abrupt rise of the Dolomites following a turn in the road.

They love the small, traditional cemetery of San Vito through which we approach the adjoining Tomba Brion. Brilliant flowers, real and synthetic, adorn almost every gravestone. On some graves small photographs, framed as part of the granite surfaces, convey a remembrance of the deceased.

The Tomba Brion was completed in 1978. It was the final and one of the most unusual works of the near-legendary twentieth-century Italian architect-designer Carlo Scarpa. The work was commissioned by the widow of an industrialist who was born in the village of San Vito and prospered in Milan. As we wander, Alice voices her professional observations about the design. Its complex scheme forms a grand L embracing the mausoleum and cemetery we've just walked through. Using broad geometric forms— squares, circles, and rectangles and one vast arc—Scarpa created a playground of chiaroscuro that sits slightly above the surrounding countryside. Perimeter walls, slanting inward, establish a meditative mind-frame of utter seclusion; visitors speak little, and only in hushed tones. The two tombs themselves, of dark granite and white marble, lie under a huge gentle arc whose ceiling is tiled in gold-green-and-blue mosaics. The tombs tilt toward each other, as if the Brions will maintain their living affection past death.

“Carl, I have just one question,” Elaine says.

Carl turns to listen. He is accompanying Elaine and her husband, Tom, on the No. 1 vaporetto, chugging along the Grand Canal from the Venice train station to Piazza di San Marco. Tom is a distant relative of Carl; the visit is the first time we have seen the couple in ten years.

“Where are all the palaces I've heard about in Venice?” Elaine continues.

At a loss for words, Carl looks back at the mansions they have already passed—Ca’ Pesaro, Ca’ Cornaro della Regina, Ca’ Foscari, Ca’ Rezzonico, among dozens of other stupendous residences on the most elegant “street” in Europe. “Sometimes,” he reports to me that evening, “you just know from early on that it's going to be a bad day.”

Carl finally finds the words to explain to Elaine that in the Venetian Republic only the doge was permitted to call his residence a
palazzo
(palace). No matter how grand their homes might be, all the other patricians had to content themselves with a
casa
(house), usually shortened to Ca’ as part of the name. Yet Carl perceives that the problem for Elaine goes beyond the name: she was expecting a row of Buckingham Palaces lined up side by side. For her a palace is not defined by style, by richness of detail or historical place; it is defined by size. With that perception comes the realization that Elaine is going to be disappointed by anything he might show her in Venice.

In retrospect I see that Elaine and Tom must have felt as frustrated by their visit to the Veneto as we were. The pleasure of the Venice experience grows in direct proportion to what the visitor brings with him. For a person with an openness to exotic, overwrought beauty, to romance, to magic ripples and shadows, to pervasive history, Venice is a sensual workout. But for a person who sees Venice as an early-day Disneyland of picture-book splendor, Venice might seem opaque and unrewarding after the novelty of streets filled with water has worn off.

“How about this, Carl?” Christoph Cornaro is in our grand salon in front of the statue of Giorgio Cornaro, who built the villa.
Christoph is contorting his body to imitate Giorgio's artful but unlikely pose. He has his left hand on his hip, with his right hand extended like the statue behind him. Christoph is frustrated because he does not have a military helmet available to place beneath his left foot. Finally, he settles for shifting his weight to his right leg and bending his left knee.

“Not a bad likeness, would you say?” Christoph says to Carl, who stands ten feet away directing Christoph's gestures and photographing him.

“You should have brought your suit of armor,” Carl chides. “I'm surprised an ambassador would leave home without his armor.”

“I'm on holiday,” Christoph protests softly.

I'm standing behind Carl, laughing at the silliness. Christoph Cornaro, I decide, is a dead ringer for Camillo Mariani's statue of Giorgio Cornaro. Both have the same high forehead, deep-set eyes, long straight nose, and small mouth; even their earlobes are alike. Their builds are identical as well, although the sculptor has super-sized Giorgio like an order at McDonald's so as to fill one of the six eight-foot-high niches that line the walls of the grand salon. Apart from the fact that Giorgio is in armor while Christoph wears the neat suit of a senior diplomat, I note only one difference between the two Cornaros who are so distant in time: Giorgio sports a full head of wavy hair and a lush beard that falls to his breastplate. Christoph is bald on top and clean-shaven.

One winter morning in Atlanta I spotted the name of Christoph Cornaro in a
New York Times
article that mentioned a concert he hosted at the Austrian embassy in New Delhi. Carl wrote to Ambassador Cornaro, explained our new connection with the Cornaro family, and inquired whether the ambassador was related to the Cornaros of Venice. Christoph sent a warm reply confirming that he is indeed a relative. Further correspondence and a few phone calls led us to invite him and his American-born wife Gail to visit us at Piombino Dese the following spring.

By the time of his visit Christoph is Austria's ambassador to the
Vatican. The appointment, intended as his last assignment before retirement, is particularly appropriate for a Cornaro; the Cornaro family supplied a total of nine cardinals between 1500 and 1789. The pope himself once referred to that history during the course of a meeting with Christoph.

Carl picks up the Cornaros at the Padua train station. They have barely climbed out of the car at Piombino Dese before Carl immerses Christoph in Cornaro genealogical material; from then on the two share hours of family sleuthing. Christoph's branch of the Cornaro family was living at Bergamo, a Venetian-controlled town northwest of Venice, when Napoleon's French army—in the course of fighting the Austrians in 1797—made a brief detour to seize Venice and its mainland territory. Curiously, later warfare and diplomatic maneuvering led France to cede Venice and the Veneto to Austria. Christoph's ancestors became Austrian citizens and prominent military leaders, one of them a field marshal of the Austrian army. The Cornaros of Venice had numerous relatives residing in Bergamo when Napoleon's army arrived, but Christoph's family is unable to establish its own precise connection, because both the public and private records of his family were destroyed before anyone made an effort to sort it out.

Gail is as congenial as Christoph. We chatter like long-lost cousins, swimming in currents of children, Italy, and expatriate life. Our evenings with the Cornaros, sitting in the Tower of Babel room, talking, listening to a CD of Schoenberg and Korngold, remind me of my childhood, although my childhood home in New Hampshire was distinctly non-Palladian and my father would have tolerated nothing as modern as Schoenberg or Korngold. Christoph and Gail tell us of their experiences in Iran, where Christoph served as Austria's ambassador while the Iranians were holding our American embassy staff hostage.

On the second day of the Cornaros’ visit Carl leads us on a cross-country adventure in search of other, more obscure Cornaro villas that he has identified. Our first stop is Villa Corner-Chiminelli, built by another branch of the Cornaro family about
twenty-five years after our Villa Cornaro. Villa Corner-Chiminelli lies in the small town of Sant’ Andrea oltre il Muson just west of Castelfranco. Its faded street-side exterior would never be noticed by a casual passerby. A phone call ahead, however, gets us admission to the remarkable garden at the rear overlooking acres of tilled farmland. The garden is especially interesting to Carl and me because of the way its trees and overgrown shrubs are laid out in a simple crossing of two pathways at right angles. It is the same layout we've seen in a 1613 watercolor of our Villa Cornaro in the archives of the Museo Correr in Venice. The trees in the garden at Villa Corner-Chiminelli—perhaps four hundred years old—have grown huge now. Their size shrinks the garden, but they suggest the way our own park would look today if it had been left untouched from Palladio's time.

For Christoph and Gail, on the other hand, the interior of Corner-Chiminelli has more appeal than the garden. Frescos, often attributed to Paolo Veronese's brother Benedetto Caliari, light the grand salon with color, even though several frescos were stolen from the villa earlier in the century. (How do you steal a fresco? Remove a section of the wall!) Two immense clear-glass Murano chandeliers are even more impressive than the remaining frescos. The clear
cristallo
is a good indicator of eighteenth-century origins.

In Atlanta, Carl seldom lets me throw anything away, no matter how overcrowded our closets. It must be a problem common to all villa owners as well, because so many of them have gathered the detritus of past centuries into a shed grandiloquently labeled “Agriculture Museum” or “Carriage Museum.” Sometimes the accumulation appears to reflect a hobby of the particular owner. At Villa Godi, the Palladio-designed villa at Lonedo, you can find a fossil museum in the
cantina
. Villa Corner-Chiminelli has another unhappy variant. Because the twentieth-century owners have been shoe manufacturers, a shed beside the villa overflows with primitive early shoemaking equipment. We lose twenty minutes nodding and expressing admiration as the custodian leads us item by item through the shed. We try various ways to express our need to
depart, but none of them conveys to the custodian a sufficient sense of urgency. Finally sated with mind-numbing knowledge of early shoemaking and struggling to recall what we learned about the villa itself, we make our way to our Fiat Furnace.