Palladian Days (28 page)

We step from our taxi at a broad iron gate barely off the narrow road and ring the bell of Villa I Tatti on the outskirts of Florence. Two housekeepers greet us in Italian and carry our bags through a graveled courtyard to the main door of the large square villa. Suffused light envelops us in a Tuscan palette of ochres and greens.

Reading an alumni journal last year, Carl learned that Walter Kaiser, his honors-program instructor at Harvard, is now director of I Tatti, Harvard's postdoctoral center for Italian Renaissance studies. Carl and I were still undergraduates when Bernard Beren-son bequeathed his famous estate to Harvard. For years, long before the Harvard connection arose, I heard of I Tatti through my father, who considered Bernard Berenson one of the great geniuses of all time and who delighted in discussing B.B. (as my father called him, as if referring to a childhood pal) and the machinations he engaged in with Joseph Duveen, Nathan Wildenstein, and other fabled art dealers. Berenson, whom many (himself included) believed to be the greatest figure in Italian art history and connois-seurship since Vasari, moved to I Tatti in 1900 with his wife, Mary. Their home became a lodestar for famous aesthetes, art dealers, scholars, and collectors of his time.

Carl wrote to Walter—with whom he had not spoken in more than thirty years—to reintroduce himself and invite Walter to visit us at Villa Cornaro. Walter graciously reciprocated with an invitation to I Tatti. And so we have come. (We still await Walter's visit to Piombino Dese.) Upon our arrival we are shown upstairs to our suite, the same one Berenson's close friend Edith Wharton used when she visited I Tatti. The megadealer Duveen also stayed in the suite, though presumably not at the same time.

Walter Kaiser leads us back downstairs and out onto the terrace for coffee with several of the Fellows who have just arrived to begin
a year of research at I Tatti: Clara, from Britain, who is working on a Carracci project while her husband—not a Fellow—ponders Kant; a Fellow from Germany researching medieval food and recipes, which he says are the key to a culture; a Fellow from Sweden with a new slant on Machiavelli; a visiting Englishwoman who is a friend of someone else and isn't studying anything other than this Edenic congregation of scholars. I am awed by the army of scholars about to be set loose upon the archives and monuments of Tuscany for the coming year. I say Tuscany because, although Harvard's I Tatti program is not formally limited in its scope, its location and the interests of its Fellows seem to dictate a weighting primarily toward Florence, Rome, and central Italy.

The throbbing heart of I Tatti is its research library. We're provided our own key to use during our stay, and I immediately lose Carl. He simply disappears into the stacks of the architecture section. I choose to wander among the 130,000 volumes, sampling a few, reading briefly in John Pope-Hennessy's book on Fra Angelico. I encounter not one soul. We are alone in this stupendous, sumptuous vault of books.

At 8:00 p.m.
aperitivi
are served for scholars and guests in the large living room, which is lined with beautiful and precious
oggetti d'arte
. Afterward, Walter hosts the two of us for a private dinner in the cozy French Library. Salmon mousse accompanies amiable conversation ranging from Italian literature to Sansovino and Palladio.

Amid such elegance, such refinement, such scholarship and art, why is Carl descending into such a funk? I am tempted to kick him under the table at dinner so that his glum look will at least be replaced by the animation of pain. Only a fear of kicking Walter by mistake restrains me. Back in our suite afterward, Carl vents the dour thought that has seized him.

“Why is it always Florence?” he exclaims. “Why doesn't Venice have something like this?”

“Carl,” I explain patiently, “no one else anywhere has anything like this. This is one of a kind in the world.”

Carl begins berating Vasari and Berenson in the same breath. “It's a matter of tastemakers,” he says. “All the foreign scholars flock to Florence and Rome. Venice just doesn't get its fair share.”

He is recycling the theory that the tilt to Florence started with Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century Italian painter who practically invented the study of art history. Vasari was a Florentine himself and his principal patrons were the Florentine rulers, so in writing his
Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
, he naturally directed most of his attention to his countrymen, flattering and reinforcing the taste of his patrons. Of course, Carl is overstating in order to make his case; Vasari's book was so successful because he really was a straight shooter. Nonetheless, anyone in Vasari's place would tend to emphasize the strengths of his own friends and countrymen.

Carl's point, not original with him, is that the qualitative judgments of Vasari, albeit culturally biased, shaped the taste of future generations, and that the popularizing influence of latter-day followers such as Berenson just solidified those judgments.

I tell Carl to take an aspirin and come to bed.

The following morning Carl returns to the library, but I remain in our room, sampling the books that surround me. I pick up S. J. Freedburg's classic
Painting in Italy, 1500-1600
. Freedburg discusses how the High Renaissance evolved in Italy through the lives of four men who each took giant strides forward: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo in Florence, Raphael in Urbino, Giorgione in Venice. Freedburg has just died; Walter tells us he has been asked to give a eulogy at a memorial service planned for the near future.

With profound thanks to Walter, and a renewed invitation to visit us at Villa Cornaro, we leave by taxi to rejoin the real world in Florence, convinced that we have just spent a day and a half in the most ivoried tower the world has to offer.

Aboard our train back to the Veneto, I tell Carl about the Freedburg explication that I have spent the morning reading, and it returns us to our mental game of comparing Venice and Florence. Frankly, in the field of Renaissance art it would be a struggle for
Venice to ever claim more than a tie with Florence. Even that might be an ambitious comparison, though Venice has never been short on ambition.

Outside the field of art, on the other hand, it is medieval and Renaissance Venice, not Florence, that seems to have engendered the values that have grown and flowered in our modern culture. I pull out my notebook, as Carl and I begin to list some of them.

Republican government heads the parade. Venice managed to maintain a republican form of government for about a thousand years without ever falling into periods of dictatorship like Athens and Rome before it. Florentine governance had barely emerged from feudalism before falling under the rule of the Medicis, a regime punctuated by the religious despotism of Savonarola. Venice's oligarchic republic was certainly flawed, but it offered a serviceable model for the modern world to build upon.

Within the context of its time and geography, Venice also showed a plucky desire to keep a healthy distance from the Church Universal. The relative freedom that it offered to the press made Venice an early publishing center and repeatedly provoked rebukes from Rome; Florence, on the other hand, was closely aligned with the papacy. Venice nurtured scientific inquiry at the University of Padua, where cadavers were dissected for research despite the protests of the local bishop. Jews found greater tolerance in Venice than anywhere else in southern Europe, and it was the University of Padua that awarded the first university degree to a woman. These freedoms were not developed in Venice to a level that we would find acceptable today, but they reflect a concern with personal liberty that was perhaps unique in its time. Identifying the social and economic conditions, the leadership structures, the concept of the individual that fostered these early developments in Venice might hold important lessons for the modern world as it seeks to sow the seeds of democratic government in broader and sometimes less promising fields.

The Republic of Venice's relevance in the modern world is obscured by post-Napoleonic romanticism that has been captivated
by visions of the Bridge of Sighs. And studying the factors that were shaping broad social views hundreds of years in the past is infinitely more difficult than investigating who influenced a single Renaissance painter.

Before our swift Eurostar train is even close to Mestre, Carl and I have agreed that the only sensible course of action is to move I Tatti to the Veneto—the research library, the dining room, the Edith Wharton suite, the artworks, everything. Walter will enjoy the view of the Alps.

“Heads up!” Carl exclaims. As we crest a gentle hill on the two-lane road to Vicenza, we confront two Mercedes sedans rushing toward us side by side. One spurts past the other and returns to the left lane just feet away from our fender.

“That's a seven-point-O,” says Ashley from the back seat. Italian drivers, she has concluded, are engaged in a competition not disclosed to foreign drivers. The competition is judged on a point system similar to that used for springboard diving in the Olympics. Points awarded for a particular maneuver are based one-half on degree of difficulty and one-half on style. An example: A big Alfa Romeo passing a Fiat Uno is assigned a low degree of difficulty, but the passing car can earn “style points” by waiting until there is a curve over the crest of a hill in a no-passing zone with oncoming traffic. The presence of hapless bicyclers would add more points. Obviously, if a Fiat Uno were to pass an Alfa Romeo in those circumstances, the score would be off the charts. Carl and I agree that Ashley's explanation of Italian driving is better than any other we've heard.

Ashley has begun her third career. After two postcollege years as
a paralegal, she attended law school and then practiced law for three years, first in Washington, D.C., then in Los Angeles. Now she has her dream job: television staff writer, albeit for the inaugural season of an unlikely new show entitled
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. The program shows early signs of attracting the cultlike following of young adults and teens that sponsors cherish. When Carl is on a business trip to Los Angeles, Ashley takes him onto the set where
Buffy
is filming and introduces him to the cast. “Buffy is a very healthy young woman,” he tells me later.

Sometimes I think of the Italian peninsula as a Yellowstone Park of warm, bubbling springs. In an irregular rhythm, one and then another boils over in an outpouring of unprecedented creativity and innovation. In one period a Mantua moves to the cultural forefront, at another time a Ferrara or a Parma. In Urbino, for example, the eruption spanned a period of about two generations in the 1400s; for that brief moment the minuscule dukedom was one of the great cultural centers of Europe, the birthplace of famous artists such as Raphael and Bramante and a magnet for others. From time to time Carl and I escape Villa Cornaro for quick excursions to such towns.

On one such occasion we're headed homeward from Urbino, chatting about the treasures we've seen in the Ducal Palace and the Oratorio de San Giovanni and calculating the time it will take us to reach Piombino Dese. We don't realize that the harrowing part of our trip lies ahead. An hour of tedious autostrada driving brings us to a service-station/rest-stop for a brioche and coffee and a fill-up. Taking my turn at the wheel, I pull up to the pumps.
“II pieno, per favore
. Fill ‘er up,” I tell the middle-aged attendant. What kind of fuel,
benzina
(gasoline) or
gasolio
(diesel)? he asks—to our surprise. We don't know how to answer him; this is our first fill-up since we rented the car and we're not familiar with the model, but the fuel type is usually specified on the little door to the fuel tank. Whatever it requires, we reply, lead-free or diesel.
“Ah, verde
.
Lead-free,” he says.
“II pieno, per favore,”
I repeat. He fills the tank; we pay him 92,000 lire and drive away, recalculating the time till we are home.

Forty miles or so down the road I feel the engine skip and I watch a mysterious dashboard light blink red. Alarmed and suddenly a bit queasy, I picture us stopping on the shoulder of the autostrada, the skinniest strip of pavement ever devoted to parking a car; I envision us smushed by a pasta truck, such as the mammoth Barilla lorry that crowded us earlier. What an ironic ending to our great Italian adventure! I alert Carl to help me watch for the next service station, adding cravenly that I hope we make it. If the motor dies, we'll have to pull onto the right-hand ribbon whether we want to or not.

After five miles more of motor-skipping, an Agip station's yellow logo shines before us like an emergency flare and I turn in. As we curve away from the autostrada, the motor conks out. I barely coast up to the island of pumps.

“Aha!” says the gray-haired attendant who awaits us. “What have we here?” He is wondering why I am out of the car and gesticulating dramatically before he can even ask how much fuel we want. I try to explain the enigma of a car that we know to be full of fuel but that is decidedly dead on its wheels. I am waving my hands ever more wildly and losing control of my Italian.

“Ahem,” he interjects. “What kind of fuel did you put in?”

Carl and I respond in mini-chorus that we'd asked the last attendant to fill it with whatever it called for, and that he'd filled it with
verde
.

“Oh, but
signori
, it takes
gasolio
, not
benzina
. That is your problem.” He walks away to service a car that has arrived at the adjoining pump.

He returns at last; we are not abandoned. The process of rectifying the wrong is extensive and little short of miraculous, but the attendant takes the matter in hand personally when he finishes his shift at the pumps twenty minutes later. His first ministrations are aborted: as he begins emptying the
benzina
from our tank with an
electric pump, the station supervisor races over and in an unusually brief Italian dialogue tells him to stop before he blows up the station and everyone within two hundred meters. Our new friend begins again, this time with a slower, but safer, siphon. With the
henzina
removed and replaced with
gasolio
, he cleans the engine with arcane ablutions strange and wonderful to us, replaces filters, smiles beatifically and assures us we have no further worries.