Palladian Days (30 page)

Puccio surprises us by opening a desk drawer, lifting an electronic keyboard to the desktop, and sitting down before it. Intrigued at the prospect of a piano presentation in the midst of a small Venetian glass shop, we sit in two chairs on the opposite side of the desk. Suddenly, after an opening measure, our host bursts into song—not in a modest voice, but full stage volume. He could fill La Fenice with that voice, which reverberates from the walls of the shop. Carl looks about nervously, as though he fears some of the glass objects might be in danger.

The multiple characters of the opera do not faze Puccio; he alternates easily between the tenor and contralto roles. At the end of one passage he pauses, asks our reaction, and then launches into the finale of the opera, which he says we will find especially suggestive of Bellini.

The whole experience is surreal. Why aren't curious crowds pressing through the doorway, I wonder, to hear Puccio's beautiful singing and fascinating music? Carl and I leave finally after abundant thank-yous for the performance. I turn to Carl as the door closes behind us.

“I love Venice!” I tell him.

Years pass before I comprehend that the families of Piombino Dese are bound by a grim episode from the past, a shared community memory of a notorious day that seared the life of the town and shaped the way its residents—even those who were born afterward—view the world.

Why did it take me so long to appreciate the importance of the events of July 1, 1944? The infectious conviviality of the Piombi-nesi hides from newcomers any somber thoughts. Perhaps in the early years my Italian limited what I was hearing. Or maybe, as we have become closer friends, the Piombinesi have allowed their conversation to return more often to that July day.

I have decided that the major reason may be the oversimplified view that I brought with me as to the role of the Italians in World War II. In my early years in the Veneto I was amused by the recurring celebrations of the Alpini. The Alpini, I heard, were honored as the heroic Italian freedom fighters who fought as partisans to overthrow the yoke of oppression of the German invaders. This seemed to be dealing loosely with history, since I remembered that the Italians and Germans were allies in World War II and remained so until after the Allies had invaded Sicily in July 1943 and were poised to invade the Italian peninsula. On my first trip to Italy in 1984, Carl and I visited the American military cemetery outside Florence to find, amid the thousands of white crosses glistening on the hillside, the grave of my mother's only brother, who died in the bloody landing at Anzio in January 1944.

In time, however, I learn that my knowledge of Italy in the war was incomplete. The king of Italy forced Benito Mussolini's resignation as prime minister in July 1943 and put him in prison. The cabinet that succeeded Mussolini's surrendered Italy to the Allies, though the action was largely symbolic because the German army
surged into Italy to continue the war. The Germans freed Mussolini from prison and set him up as the figurehead leader of a rival Fascist government based at Salo in the north, while the legitimate Italian government declared war on Germany and aligned itself with the Allies. It was in that late period from October 1943 to April 1945—with the front lines of the Germans and Allies mired at first below Rome and later north of Florence—that the Alpini emerged as true partisans in the Alpine region, not the opera buffa figures that I had envisioned.

Early on the morning of July 1, 1944, German soldiers who had been billeted in the
barchessa
of the villa and elsewhere in the surrounding area assembled in the center of Piombino Dese. With prepared lists in hand, they dispersed through the town and banged on the doors of families with young men who were thought to be less than fully committed to the Fascist cause.

The men were brought into the town square at gunpoint and then loaded onto decrepit German trucks bound for northern factories. A young woman with an enormous belly, obviously in the final weeks of pregnancy, burst from a doorway screaming. She ran to one of the trucks and struggled awkwardly to climb aboard. “You must take me, too!” she shrieked, grabbing one of the prisoners. “You can't take my husband alone; you must take me, too!” Madly screaming and crying, impervious to the shouts and imprecations of the German soldiers, she could not be pried from the man she clung to. Finally the German officer in charge threw them both off the truck and ordered the sorry cortege to depart without them.

Giuseppina tells me this story. The woman was her mother's sister-in-law.

“They took my father,” Gastone tells me. “He was shipped to Germany for forced labor in the war plants.”

“He returned after the war?” I ask.

“Yes, he walked back after the war. He was very, very thin, and he had a long black beard,” he replies. “I'll never forget when I first saw him.”

“Is he still living?”

“No, he died years ago. Would you like to see his picture?” Gas-tone reaches for his billfold and produces a small, worn photo of his long-dead father.

Young Epifanio Marulli, who later became custodian of Villa Cornaro for Dick Rush, happened to be at the parish church on the morning of July 1, helping the priests on some project. He was hiding in the campanile of the church when the Germans banged on the door of his home. They took three of his brothers away to Germany, but never found Epifanio.

“None of them came back,” Epifanio says quietly. “Two died in an industrial accident in the factory where they were placed. The other died in a bombing raid on his factory, just ten days before the end of the war.”

“Who did the bombing?”

“Americans, I think.”

More than a score of boys and young men were taken from Piombino Dese that morning. The knocking came at front doors throughout the town and surrounding countryside.

Epifanio tells his tale of that July 1 with a kind of wonder in his voice. “My father worked for the
sindaco
of Piombino Dese during those years. He was a chauffeur and worked around the
sindaco's
house. The
sindaco
knew everyone in town; he was the one who gave the Germans the list.”

“Why? Why would he do that, especially to the family of his own employee?” I ask in amazement.

“Un fascista,”
he replies simply.

Epifanio is in his eighties now, living quietly with Elena in retirement in a modest home on the street that leads from the villa to the train station. Often I spot him and wave as I hurry to the station for a trip into Venice. I can see in his face that after all these decades since July 1,1944, he still cannot fathom what hatred, cynicism, desperation, or depravity precipitated the events of that day.

The postwar years were cruel in the Veneto. “Find food for today” was the imperative of each morning. I think of Giacomo's story of
his father desperately fishing for food when other resources failed, and of Ilario's emigration to Australia to relieve the strain on his family.

Now, in a strange reversal, the Veneto is the fastest-growing region in all of Europe. Prosperity abounds on all sides. Yet I am sure that the Piombinesi have their appreciation of the present anchored in their collective memory of the past. The Italian celebration of food is often noted. Surely a great part of it is grounded in the knowledge that today's food must be enjoyed because tomorrow's food is uncertain. In the same way, the overwhelming reliance on family ties must be influenced by experiences like July l, 1944, when trust in the more extended circle of political leadership, community, and friendship failed.

My father, a Scot by birth who lived most of his life in New Hampshire, always carried in his jacket pocket a wad of photographs of the primitive nineteenth-century New England paintings that he had collected—portraits mostly, a few landscapes, an occasional still life. The paintings crowded the walls of our Main Street house when I was growing up. Daddy eagerly displayed his photographs to everyone he met who showed even a slight interest in American portraiture. The subjects of the paintings looking down from the walls of our New England home—a sea captain and his wife from Bedford, a serious young girl from Concord named May Hill, and many others—became for him an extended family.

In this one way, the grand salon on the first floor of Villa Cornaro sometimes reminds me of my Littleton home. The portraits in the grand salon are not paintings, of course, but full-figure statues executed in
marmorino
, a type of stucco. Each of them measures eight feet tall and is set in its own niche in the wall. Palladio planned for
the statues from the beginning; the niches are clearly shown on the floor plan in his
Four Books
. The Pisani family at Palladio's Villa Pisani at Montagnana elected to use the four similar niches there for statues representing the seasons of the year. The Cornaros took a different tack. After the original patron Giorgio Cornaro died, his son Girolamo in the early 1590s commissioned Camillo Mariani to create statues of illustrious Cornaros of the past.

It was a typical Cornaro gesture. The Cornaros loved paintings and busts of themselves. If their public offices did not generate enough portraiture, they were always ready to commission something on their own.

The two earliest figures among the statues at Villa Cornaro are
of Marco Cornaro, who became doge of Venice in 1365, and his grandson Giorgio, who died a hero of the Republic in 1434 after being captured in battle and tortured in a Milan prison. There are two of Giorgio's grandchildren. Giorgio's granddaughter Caterina Cornaro, queen of Cyprus, is shown, of course, together with her brother, who was also named Giorgio. This Giorgio was so influential in Venetian affairs that he was acclaimed as “father of his country” more than two hundred years before George Washington was born. Giorgio's son Girolamo fills the next niche. The last holds the third Giorgio, the one who commissioned Palladio to design and build the villa.

Statues in the grand salon, lower
piano nobile
, with the villa's patron, Giorgio Cornaro, at left

The southern wall of the grand salon, opening onto the south portico, fills the room with light and warmth from its huge doorway and eight windows, four below and four above. The other walls each hold two of the niches and statues. Because of the four large columns supporting the ceiling and upper floor, the six statues are visible simultaneously from just one spot in the room, a position about four feet into the room from the north. The effect on a visitor standing at that place in the early days must have been profound—to be confronted by six legendary heroes of the republic, all larger than life, leaning outward from their niches with animated hand gestures and sharp gazes. Together they make up the earliest full-figure portrait gallery of one family in western art.

Like Caravaggio on canvas, Mariani strove for lifelike portraiture. His Caterina seems poised to speak. His first Giorgio embodies patience and forbearance in features and stance. To arrive at the likenesses, Mariani would have studied earlier commemorative medallions and, when available, contemporary paintings.

Camillo Mariani was born in Vicenza in 1567, two years after Michelanglo's death in Rome. He trained in Vicenza in the workshop of Agostino Rubini, but his talent was recognized early by the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi and others, and he was entrusted with important commissions. He was just twenty-one years old when he sculpted three of the marble statues that look down on Piazza di San Marco in Venice from atop the Marciana Library. Soon he had
his own workshop and was creating statues for Palladio's basilica and the church of San Pietro in Vicenza.

His six statues at Villa Cornaro can be viewed as a culmination of his work in the Veneto. First, the project marks his important role in the introduction to the Veneto of
marmorino
as a medium for sculpture. Second, it marks Mariani as a bridge from the Renaissance to the Baroque. In 1597, ready for a bigger stage, Mariani moved his workshop to Rome, where he was immediately accepted as a leading figure in its artistic world and tapped for works throughout the city. Pope Clement VIII commissioned him to execute several statues in
marmorino
for his chapel in Saint Peter's Basilica. Mariani's statues for the church of San Bernardo alle Terme and for Villa Cornaro are sometimes called his master-works. Although Mariani died young, at age forty-four, he is viewed as an important influence on Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Italy's greatest sculptor of the seventeenth century, because Bernini's father and mentor, Pietro Bernini, trained in Mariani's workshop.

In quiet moments from time to time I sit in the grand salon studying the statues. Sometimes I feel as if I were at a Cornaro family reunion, with these famous Cornaros jabbering and socializing around me. At other times I focus on the short, brilliant career of Camillo Mariani and the treasures that Villa Cornaro is privileged to share with the historic churches and chapels of Rome.

At 2:00 a.m. the
squillo
(ring) of the telephone in Atlanta sounds more like a
strillo
(scream). Carl nudges me to answer the phone; it's on my side of the bed. My heart pounds with trepidation. What calamity is being announced? Where are the children?