Palladian Days (34 page)

In the dove-gray light of a late September morning we walk gingerly onto the upstairs south portico. Our beloved villa is masked in
impalcatura
(scaffolding) like an old lady swathed in bandages. I kneel to touch one of the old beams visible through the expanse where the cement patch has been removed; the wood disintegrates
into dust between my fingers. I touch another spot and come away with another handful of powder.

Removing the cement patch has opened a fascinating window into the structure of the portico floor. Running north-south are twenty-four large structural beams. Atop them are two layers of thick planks, running at right angles to the beams on the upper level and then north-south again on the lower. The terrazzo pavement rests atop the planks. The bottom of the beams and the underside of the first layer of planks are visible from the downstairs portico twenty-four feet below, but it isn't possible to discern any details of their surface from that distance. The ends of the beams—the parts that engage niches in the wall and support the entire floor of the portico—seem to have disintegrated the most. Clearly, we have narrowly avoided a catastrophe.

Settling on a plan for restoration proves to be more contentious than I would ever have imagined. When a twelve-foot beam is rotten for half its length, it seems elementary to me that it should be replaced. In Italy, we learn, the matter is not so straightforward. Carlo Formentin tells us that if the middle half of the beam is still sound, that half should be retained, with new wood spliced and glued at each end! Angelo Marconato, practical as always, urges replacing the entire skeleton of rotten beams with new ones of specially aged Alpine timber. Carl's position is that we want to make the repair in a way that will last another 450 years. For us, the proper question is, What would Palladio do? The answer seems obvious: He would opt for new beams. Carlo insists that restoration of stubs of the old beams will produce a stable floor while pleasing the officials at the Belle Arti office. He has already had a preliminary meeting with them in Venice; the official to whom the application has been assigned will visit next week for a personal inspection. Our dilemma in the whole debate is this: We assume that the splicing and gluing will last beyond our own lifetime, but we feel a genuine obligation to posterity—an obligation to preserve this villa not just for the next generation or two but to the twenty-fifth century.

The inspector fails to appear; the press of “other work” prevents her visit, she tells Carlo later. Two subsequent visits are similarly scheduled and canceled.

So in mid-October, with the interior temperature of the villa falling by the day and forcing us into layers of sweaters, we leave for Atlanta with no work begun. We instruct Carlo and Angelo to proceed with utmost speed to secure permission and go ahead with the restoration. We want them to push for complete replacement of the beams and subflooring, but we are prepared to learn from the recommendations of the Belle Arti staff. Carlo says he will retain consultants to test all of the beams ultrasonically especially the sixteen beams that are still covered by the original terrazzo. Angelo warns that he has no way to replace beams from below; the remaining terrazzo
must
be removed if the beams beneath it are rotten.

Through the winter I telephone Carlo Formentin at regular intervals. The news each time is the same: The inspector has not visited. Meanwhile the Miolos teil me with bewilderment that Carlo is taking hundreds of photos of the exposed areas. Carlo assures me he has prepared complete schematics showing how he proposes to resolve the problems. I stay in touch with Angelo as well; his rising impatience and blossoming disgust at the delay are manifest.

“Let's just go ahead,” he pleads. “We must finish this work. You are paying daily for rental of the
impalcatura
, which I could be using on other jobs.” Angelo suggests we have Carlo tell the Belle Arti office that we are going to begin emergency repairs on a specified date.

I stop sleeping well and begin drinking three cups of coffee a day. I shudder at the suffering of my villa each time I'm told of a new winter storm passing through the Veneto.

Finally, at the beginning of May, we arrive back in Piombino Dese. Nothing has been done to the portico; the south face of the villa is veiled in pipes, plastic, and a small construction elevator. Carl convokes an all-party meeting of our advisers within days of our arrival. We meet on the north portico of the villa amid a mass
of blueprints, meticulous drawings, and engineering reports—and a sea of photographs. In addition to Carlo and Ernesto Formentin and Angelo Marconato, we are joined by a consulting architect from Venice whom we have retained to give us a fresh view of the situation. Midway through the meeting Silvana arrives with a round of coffee from the
caffe
.

A plan of action emerges, though there is no clear consensus. Carlo reluctantly agrees to write to the Belle Arti office stating that for the safety and preservation of the villa we must begin restoration of the portico in the middle of next week with or without a permit. The replacement of the beams will be determined on a beam-by-beam basis. Though the ultrasound inspection report indicates that sixteen beams will require complete replacement, six can be spliced and reinforced with steel and two will require only steel reinforcement. Angelo tells us that he will place the spliced beams in locations that seem to bear less lateral stress. The planks and terrazzo will be completely replaced.

I am not clear whether Carlo actually delivers our message to the Belle Arti office in the terms we directed. Nonetheless, on the day before we are scheduled to begin the repair, he advises us that the permit has been issued.

Angelo and his crew proceed expeditiously with the extraordinarily complex renovation. We watch anxiously as the terrazzo and planks are removed. The heavy beams are extracted and replaced in pairs so the lateral support is not compromised at any time. We feel relief only when all the subflooring planks have been installed and secured, leaving the portico ready for the installation of new terrazzo on top.

Ernesto identifies for us an artisan, Rodolfo De Monte, who has the skill to re-create
terrazzo veneziano
using the same techniques that Palladio's own workers used. Rodolfo inspects the old terrazzo carefully before Angelo removes it.

“Do you have any old bricks we can grind up, sixteenth-century bricks?” he asks.

“Yes,” I reply. A few years ago, before my first encounter with
Villa Cornaro, I would have considered such an inquiry absurd, but in fact we have a tall stack of old bricks that Dick Rush acquired in an unfulfilled plan to built a period wall along one side of the property.

“Eccellente!”
Rodolfo nods. “That will save money.” In addition to ground bricks, the terrazzo will have fragments of local stone in several colors, all set in a cementitious paste and then ground down to a smooth, shining surface.

Palladio gives some practical advice on terrazzo in
Four Books
.

Palladio omits the fact—which he must have known—that workers in his time tended to dump into the terrazzo not just “pounded bricks,” gravel, and river pebbles, but almost anything else they found around the job site. The original terrazzo in one of Villa Cornaro's upstairs bedrooms includes a smoothed and polished peach pit, as well as part of an old handmade nail. Contessa Emo told me that the original terrazzo at Villa Barbaro has a fragment of a blue-and-white plate.

Rodolfo's disappointing news is that he cannot begin his work until the fall; cool weather is required for mixing and applying the terrazzo.

The centuries-old process that Rodolfo and his crew commence in the fall is fascinating. If the elevator for bringing the materials up from the ground were not there to spoil the effect, I could imagine Elena Cornaro standing in my stead, watching as the original pavement is installed. Rodolfo begins by having his men spread a four-inch layer of a wet pewter-gray cementlike material. While the mixture is still a viscous liquid, he personally sprinkles the brick shards and two types of colored stone onto the surface, pulling large handfuls from big gray cloth sacks slung over his
shoulders. The key to the final look is the density and mix of the stones he is scattering with a deliberate, repetitive motion. The fragments are pressed down into the matrix with large flat boards. Like all true artisans, Rodolfo uses no guide except his own lifetime of experience and his memory of the original terrazzo pattern, which he has studied carefully. He is the third generation of pavement artisans in his family; he confides to me with a sigh that he has no sons, and his daughters cannot be expected to continue the strenuous family tradition.

When the last of the scaffolding has been dismantled and carted away, the last worker has left, and Carl and I stand alone on the portico with the fields stretching away from us to the south, it is easier to admire the glistening new surface—a perfect re-creation of the sample we have retained of the old pavement—than it is to recall all the exasperated transatlantic phone calls and frustrating meetings that were required to bring it about. And, though the process still rankles, we are comforted by our assurance that the work meets the ultimate test that we apply to everything we do at Villa Cornaro: Palladio would be pleased.

“Che bella!”
Giacomo exclaims as we emerge from the
stazione
and pause at the top of the steps leading down to the streaming life of the Grand Canal. Fractals of sunlight dance on the water. Vaporetti stream back and forth on the busy waterway, ferrying commuting workers from Piazzale Roma to their offices and shops, students to their schools, and tourists to their first monument of the day. On the opposite shore the oddly proportioned dome of the church of San Simeone Piccolo sits atop the skyline like a green overcooked egg. A liquid ochre light suffuses the morning air. Silvana joins Giacomo in admiring the fairyland scene. Silvana
has accompanied me on several previous excursions into Venice, but this is only Giacomo's fourth visit to Venice in his entire life— and the first in more than twenty years—despite his living just twenty miles away.

Silvana surprised Carl and me two weeks ago by asking whether on some future Monday—”closed” day at Caffe Palladio—we would lead them on a tour of Venice. For years Giacomo has watched as Carl and I troop off to Venice, sometimes several mornings a week. At last his curiosity about Venice's attraction for us has overcome his reluctance to leave his familiar world of Piom-bino Dese. We are quick to comply, happy for two reasons: first, because they feel comfortable asking us and, second, because they would trust so much of their limited free time to our guidance.

Carl is careful to put a Venice street map in his back pocket for the excursion, even though we seldom use one anymore. “I couldn't stand the embarrassment if we got lost with the Miolos in tow,” he says sheepishly.

From the train station we set off on foot. Silvana has quietly reminded us that Giacomo is timorous around water, so we forgo a vaporetto ride. Our first stop is a quick peek into the church of San Simeone Grande. Confusingly the church of San Simeone
Grande
(large) is quite small—much smaller than the nearby church of San Simeone
Piccolo
(small). Originally, each of the islands that make up Venice was a separate parish with its own parish church. Most of those parish churches remain active today, avoiding the merger and conglomeration that assail most other aspects of modern life.

We want the Miolos to see San Simeone Grande because it typifies so much of the charm and constant freshness of Venice. Its exterior is as nondescript as the small
campo
on which it sits; it appears in no guidebook itinerary of suggested tourist stops. Yet, when we step into the cool, calm interior, we point Giacomo and Silvana to a magnificent painting hanging on the north wall,
The Last Supper
, by the late-Renaissance master Tintoretto. The impact of the painting itself is heightened by the zest of discovery.

Standing before it, we are suddenly washed by streams of Buxtehude's
Prelude in C tumbling from a small tracker organ high above the main entrance. No Mass is under way, so we are free to wander about, but we stand immobile, deeply moved by the music filling the nave. The organist concludes his performance with the final prolonged chords, then breaks the spell cast upon us by beginning to practice separate passages of the work. Giacomo wants to tarry, but we pull him away. Carl and I call the constant drive to see as many sites as possible the “tourist imperative,” but I don't know how to say that in Italian.

“This is just an antipasto,” I tell him instead. “The feast is still ahead.”

We're headed for the church of the Frari, but we pause en route at Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista to admire Pietro Lombardo's stately marble entranceway from about 1480. Inside is Codussi's masterful early-Renaissance stairway, but we don't have time this morning to talk our way past the obdurate receptionist who usually blocks access to it.

The Frari looms over its San Polo neighborhood, not far from the geographical center of Venice. The church, begun by the Franciscan monks in the late thirteenth century, is one of the two great mendicant-friar churches of Venice. (The other is the Dominicans’ church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.) Much grander than parish churches, both are towering testimony to the appeal of the mendicant orders in early Venice. Today they are potent reminders of the contemporary burden of the Church in maintaining the thousands of religious and artistic treasures throughout Venice and the rest of Italy.

The Frari has been a particular favorite of ours, I tell the Miolos, since we attended an organ concert there during our first spring at Piombino Dese. The monastic church is home to two magnificent period organs; both date from the 1700s, but one is from early in the century and the other late. The concert was carefully planned to show the evolution of organs in that period. With the audience seated on folding chairs placed temporarily in the choir, facing Titian's luminous
Assumption of the Virgin
over the central altar, the
recitalist played the first half of the program on the 1732 organ, perched high over the north choir stalls, creating a simple, sweet singing tone. For the second half of the program he crossed to the 1794 organ, whose flute and reed stops produced a much more complex and colorful—though no more beautiful—sound.