Palladian Days (33 page)

Sally with Vittoria
on the south portico

Our Venetian friends Guido and Giovanna like bringing their daughters Vittoria and Antonia to Piombino Dese.

“They never see grass in Venice,” Guido explains, watching them chase across our park. One of my favorite photos at Villa Cornaro shows me sitting on the south portico with Vittoria as a baby in my lap. Carl likes the picture so much he uses a slide of it in his Harvard Club speech to illustrate how Palladio's villas are happily alive today.

Guido and Giovanna own the third floor of Ca’ Morosini, a fifteenth-century palace conveniently located just around the corner from busy Campo Santa Maria Formosa in the Castello section of Venice. On our first visit there, for dinner one evening, we learn to grasp the stair rail tightly because of the treads’ distinct sag toward one side.

“You noticed how we're sinking toward the canal?” Guido asks cheerily as he greets us. “We'll soon fall in if we're not careful.” He tells us the startling amount he and the other owners—including his parents on the floor below—have already paid to shore up the weakening foundations, and the infinitely larger sum needed for a longer-lasting resolution of the problem.

“You are so lucky that your villa is on solid ground,” he adds. I learn over time that complaining about the perilous and costly infirmities of their homes is one of the major ties binding Venetian families. As mainlanders, Carl and I will never fully partake of the bracing spirit of pride and impending disaster that the old Venetian families share.

Giovanna seems suspiciously relaxed for a dinner party hostess, but she quickly explains her calm: Guido is the
cuoco
. “I love having guests,” she says. “It's the only time Guido cooks.”

At one point later in the evening I notice Carl discussing with another guest Venice's Fourth War with Genoa—in Italian. Carl's language ability is directly linked to subject matter. Fortunately for him, Venice is every Venetian's favorite subject.

Our fifteen minutes of fame comes up three minutes short.

Carl receives a phone call at his office one day from Hugh Howard, who introduces himself as a writer for Bob Vila. He
explains that Vila, who began his television career with a PBS series on restoring and repairing old houses, also produces occasional specials for the Arts & Entertainment network under the general title
Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes
. His latest project is a three-part documentary to be entitled
In Search of Palladio
. The first two-hour segment will be “The Villas of the Veneto,” to be followed by “Palladianism in England and Ireland” and “The Palladian Legacy in America.” Can a visit to Villa Cornaro be included? Hugh asks.

Does Luciano Pavarotti sing opera? Within days, Carl has inundated Hugh with background material, copies of Doug Lewis's articles, magazine clippings. Well in advance, we schedule filming for a Friday in June.

On the preceding Sunday I receive a frantic call from the show's producer. Plans for filming the show's final three-minute summary in the garden at Villa Emo have gone awry because of a conflicting event there. Can they please film it in the garden at Villa Cornaro? On Tuesday?

We are still at breakfast when the technical crew arrives Tuesday morning. Their first task, to our surprise, is to lay what appears to be a small railroad track across the lawn of the park. Hugh Howard arrives to explain things.

“We need the track for a camera dolly, so the camera can follow Bob in a long smooth shot as he strolls across the lawn,” he says.

Bob Vila himself arrives shortly after lunch in the company of his agent and his production assistant. Their goal is to complete filming during
riposo
, while Piombino Dese is at its quietest. The filming moves slowly. Bob's leisurely three-minute amble across the park, with Villa Cornaro looming majestically in the background, is chopped into small segments of two or three sentences, all repeated in countless retakes punctuated by changes in phrasing, lighting adjustments, and repositioning of the dolly track. In the summary Bob comments on Palladio's innovation, the stages of his development, his importance in western architecture. It's an
effective discourse, and I'm convinced that I hear echoes of Carl's Harvard Club speech in it. Vila's delivery is as confident and relaxed on the sixth retake as on the first.

As the afternoon passes, it becomes clear that the time required has been seriously underestimated.
Riposo
comes to an end, and the normal noises of a small town return. A lawn mower barks to life in the town playground west of the
barchessa
. An Italian member of the Vila crew, whose job description apparently focuses on such challenges, is dispatched to reason with the mower operator. Everyone stands about in anticipation. Soon the racket shuts off and the “expediter” returns, followed by the mower operator, who has been invited to watch the filming. In less than ten minutes the cacophony of a jackhammer shatters the air. I remember seeing a work crew setting up on the Viale della Stazione this morning; apparently they are tearing up the asphalt to install a larger drain along the edge of the street. The expediter grimly strides toward the source of the hammering. Again the noise abates after a few minutes; a productive hour ensues. Then from the yard of the church youth center next door to the east arises the tap-tap-tap of a dribbling basketball; everyone turns to the expediter, who sets off again. In a few minutes the crowd of spectators has been augmented by a small group of basketball players. The rest of the work proceeds smoothly to a conclusion, with only minor pauses for airplanes overhead, screeching truck brakes, a barking dog, and a wailing baby. Three final minutes of videotape has consumed four hours.

We adjourn to the villa for a celebratory prosecco, amid praise for the expediter. He won't tell us his method for preserving the peace with the jackhammer, but I suspect he may have used a four-letter word:
lire
.

Looking ahead to Friday, when Bob and his crew will return to film the Villa Cornaro portion of the show, I begin to do some arithmetic in my head. If filming a three-minute segment took four
hours, how many hours will it take to film a twelve-minute segment?

“Friday will be a long day” I tell Carl as we drift off to sleep.

Friday brings other worries as well. We awaken to streaming sheets of rain. A low gray sky presses down on Piombino Dese. Will Bob and his crew even bother to show up under these conditions? In fact, everyone arrives exactly as scheduled. The villa will look as beautiful on film as if it had full sun, Bob assures me. The cameraman and lighting crew immediately set to work filming features throughout the villa. Bob and Hugh explain that the basic narrative of the Villa Cornaro segment will center on Carl and me greeting Bob on the south portico and leading him through the grand salon and the dining room, but other shots will be edited in to show particular details and elements from other rooms.

“We won't use a script,” Bob says. “Just talk with me naturally as though I were a friend visiting your home.” We take a preliminary walk through the villa with Bob and Hugh. Hugh has prepared an outline of subjects he thinks would be of interest, but he and Bob are open to suggestions from Carl and me. We agree that discussion of the graffiti on the portico and the Masonic symbolism of the frescos should be added. We don't rehearse specific questions and answers, however; Bob says we should just listen and respond naturally, as if in a friendly conversation.

Costumes: I decide to wear a bright sea-green pantsuit; Carl toys with the idea of a suit but settles on slacks and blazer. We join the group downstairs, where Bob's assistant hides a tiny microphone behind my lapel, connected to a wireless sending device hooked inside the waistband of my slacks. Carl is wired in similar fashion.

The camera begins rolling with Bob alone on the portico. Carl and I join him and are quickly caught up in conversation. Talking
with Bob is easy because of his friendly, relaxed, and interested manner—and, of course, he's asking us questions about something we love! The greatest surprise is that we film each of the three scenes in a single uninterrupted take—except the very first scene, where I reflexively begin discussing one of the graffiti in Italian, rather than English. We pause after each scene while Bob, Hugh, and the others closet themselves in a dark room to review the tape carefully and see if a retake is needed; each time they return satisfied. Filming is complete within two hours. There must have been something wrong with that mathematical formula I was using.

The program does not appear on A&E until almost a year later. Our trepidation mounts throughout the wait. When we finally see the show, we're relieved that there seems little to embarrass us, although I wish I had not so enthusiastically responded “Absolutely!” to four different questions.

The week after the broadcast, Carl and I are in Concourse E at the Atlanta airport waiting to board for our trip back to Italy. Carl wanders away to the newsstand, but his progress is blocked by a middle-aged man.

“Didn't I see you on TV last week? On Bob Vila's show?” the man asks.

Carl hurries back to tell me the story. His grin is bigger than Texas.

We should have read the clues. The signs were there, but we were blind to them.

For years we have observed a slight dip in the terrazzo floor on the south portico upstairs. We should have it leveled, we say to ourselves,
so rainwater won't pool here. Standing water might seep down and damage some of the 450-year-old wooden beams supporting the pavement.

Two-thirds of the portico floor is covered in original
terrazzo veneziano;
the balance is patched in an ugly modern-day cement tinted red in an effort to be less obtrusive, but actually managing to suggest heavy rouge on the cheeks of an aging courtesan. The patch was the clue we overlooked. We should have asked ourselves two questions: Why was that patch put there? and Did it resolve the problem? Had we done so, we might have realized that the depression in the floor was merely a symptom of a problem that the cement patch had hidden but hadn't fixed.

“Sawdust, Sally,” Carl tells me by telephone, anxiety clouding his voice. “Everything under the cement is completely rotten.”

It is July and ordinarily we would both be in Atlanta. This year Carl, now newly retired, has flown to Venice to represent us at a special concert to be held at the villa. Usually we host concerts only during the spring and fall months when we are living there, but this program is sponsored by a regional organization, and the
comune
implored us to allow it. (The Miolos insist that we be present for any event, because otherwise their authority to enforce our rules for keeping trucks off the grass, maintaining locked gates, and the like is under constant assault.)

“Angelo and I opened up that cement patch upstairs. It's a disaster: the underflooring is completely rotted out, and the major beams under that are seriously rotted as well. We're lucky the whole floor hasn't collapsed on us while we're having prosecco on the portico downstairs,” Carl continues.

Then his tale gets worse. “If the portico collapses, we lose lateral support and the back wall of the villa might go as well.”

We discuss our next steps. Angelo Marconato, our faithful contractor, will install scaffolding right away to support the upstairs portico. Then he will remove more of the cement patch to see how widespread the problem is. Ernesto Formentin, our
geometra
, and his son Carlo, an engineer, will work with Angelo in evaluating the
extent of the damage. Ernesto and Carlo will prepare an application to the Soprintendente di Belle Arti describing the proposed renovation and requesting approval for the work.

No one can even guess how much it will all cost.

Our return to Piombino Dese in the fall to see our ailing villa is joyously delayed for our younger son Jim's marriage to Juli Milnor in late September. Carl and I marvel once again at the good taste and good fortune of our sons in bringing such talented, attractive young wives into our family. Juli visited us at the villa with Jim two years earlier just as an American photographer was taking pictures for an article on Palladian villas in
Travel & Leisure
magazine. The photographer, upon meeting Juli, quickly decided that she—not Carl, Jim, or I—was the proper person to include in one of the photos.

The wedding day is glorious, a wonderful occasion made even happier by the presence of two special guests: Leonardo Miolo and his
fidanzata
Elisa. Leo is unquestionably the handsomest groomsman, while Elisa attracts her own admirers among the men in attendance. Carl and I spring a surprise at the rehearsal dinner the night before: as a memento we give each couple a ceramic tile hand-painted by Marina Rossetto, a wonderful Venetian artisan, with flowers, the names Jim and Juli, and the wedding date. (The tiles are such a success that we ask Marina to prepare some similar ones commemorating Carl and Lisa's wedding five years earlier.) Afterward, Jim and Juli fly off to Costa Rica on their honeymoon, Leonardo and Elisa travel to visit Dick and Julie Rush in Florida and then join Ashley for a brief stay in Los Angeles, and Carl and I board a plane for Italy.