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Authors: Sally Gable

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BOOK: Palladian Days
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On Saturday, the day of the reception that the Rushes have
planned in order to introduce us to their friends and to say their own farewells after twenty years of associations, the weather is bone-chilling again and the sky bleak. From early morning,
fioriste
are ringing at the gate with their deliveries—enormous bouquets of lilies and roses and gladioli, each one dressed in shiny colored paper and trailing elaborate ribbon-bows. Sending flowers to a hostess in advance of an event, we learn, is an appealing Italian alternative to bringing a bottle of wine or some other small gift of appreciation. Julie reads each card with such emotion that she occasionally freezes like a statue and can neither move nor speak. Once Dick calls out, “Julie, what is it? Who's the card from?” and Julie simply cannot answer.

Dick organizes the two
homhole
, one in the dining room and the other in the grand salon. The effect is like a blowtorch set to work melting a glacier. Yet a party spirit is emerging. Flowers flood every surface. The long narrow dining table crowds three-cornered
panini
, tiny pastries, multicolored cookies, and seductive chocolates edge to edge.

For the Rushes, and probably most of the others present, the reception is a sad occasion masquerading as a happy one. Only Ashley, Carl, and I are oblivious to the glum farewell side of the affair. For us, everything is festive, albeit frigid. Dozens of Piombi-nesi stand about in the grand salon, huddled in their topcoats and scarves, launching barrages of Venetan dialect at each other. As we approach to introduce ourselves, they obligingly switch to Italian. I tentatively conclude that a large part of the art of speaking Italian lies in nodding with a big smile while keeping out of your eyes any glimmer of your true confusion. “Pleased to meet you.” “We're so happy to be in Piombino Dese.” “The villa is a marvel.” I establish a pattern of Italian phrases and begin to enjoy myself as one handshake follows another.
Note to diary: Suggest tactfully to Carl that he mask his look of terror when addressed in Italian
.

Don Aldo Roma, chief parish priest, is present, stately in his white robe and earnestly friendly. Before I can respond to his first comment, three more have followed. We see Epifanio and Elena
Marulli, the now-retired custodians of the villa. We meet others who will become well known to us in future years and some whom I don't recall ever seeing again. The
sindaco
is not invited, of course, and probably would not have attended even if he had been; the memory of the soccer field war is still raw. Ernesto and Irma Formentin arrive with their daughter Nella. At Dick's request, Nella has brought her harp, and she warms her hands sufficiently to provide a short but cheery recital.

I've been looking about to spot a tall, burly Paul Bunyan who will match the image I have formed of Ilario Mariotto based on the tales I have heard—a man to brave the Australian sugarcane fields, then on his return to organize the farmers to stand foursquare with Dick in his battle with the
sindaco
over the soccer field. No such figure appears. Then I am approached by a smiling Italian man of about my age, and my size as well, a man who would have to lean to hold his place in a strong wind. Yet the hand he extends to shake mine has the resilience of solid concrete.

“I'm Ilario,” he says in clear, if diffident, English. His wife Gio-vannina is beside him. Her strong, friendly face is framed in wavy blond hair.

“We're pleased to meet our new neighbors,” she says in careful Italian.

Finally, all the food is gone, Nella has packed away her harp, and the damp chill has penetrated every bone. The crowd departs as swiftly as it arrived. My silk suit and light coat give little protection against the cold, but the prospect of so many new neighbors—all patiently prepared to help me in my new language—envelops me like a warm cocoon.

Dick and Julie Rush leave early the next morning. To our surprise, Epifanio Marulli arrives—just as though he had not retired—to load their luggage into his car as he has done for dozens of their departures in the past. We learn that Dick and Julie will be staying a few days at a hotel in Verona, where Epifanio is driving them, and then will return to the States. With little pomp, they settle in the
car and Epifanio drives them slowly out the side gate and around into Via Roma. We see them pass the villa a final time and then move out of sight to the west—the fifth family to own Villa Cornaro in 435 years. Perhaps they have brought more change in the condition of the villa than any owner before them, preserving for art history one of architecture's most influential homes. Carl and I realize that our own watch has begun.

8
A
Winter for Study

Having no heating system at the villa imposes a discipline that I've appreciated from the beginning. As one benefit, we are forced to use the villa much the same way that the original Cornaro family used it. Before planting season, Giorgio Cornaro and his family would gather up their clothes, furniture, tapestries, and other household items and journey to Piombino with a small group of personal servants. They probably traveled by horse-drawn barge, leaving the lagoon at Venice to proceed up the Dese River to its intersection with the Marzenego, then up the Marzenego to the Dragonzolo, finally disembarking just fifty meters south of the villa. They would stay in the countryside through the fall harvest, supervising the storage of grain in the attic and the winemaking in the
cantina
(cellar).

So Carl, Ashley, and I return to Atlanta a week after the Rushes leave Villa Cornaro. We arrived at the villa without barge or servants, and we return to Atlanta with no grain or wine. We just carry surreal memories and a determination to spend the winter learning more about the mansion/barn that has joined our lives like a moose at a picnic. I realize that I've associated myself with a long chain of history, but it is a history I don't know, about people I never heard of, events I've never read about, and influences on the modern world that I never knew existed.

Giorgio Cornaro, Palladio's patron and the villa's first owner, died at the famous Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Lepanto? A famous battle? A later owner of the villa died in the defense of Rettimo. Where's that? Carl and I now own—arrayed in niches around the grand salon—six eight-foot-tall statues of celebrated people we have never heard of by a Renaissance sculptor whose name means nothing to us. The walls of the villa are covered with dozens of frescos depicting Bible stories I heard years ago in Sunday school and now remember only dimly. This will be a long winter.

In our search for information about the villa, we have a lead. The Rushes have told us that in the mid-1970s a government-supported organization in Vicenza—the town twenty-five miles away where Palladio lived—commissioned Douglas Lewis, a young American scholar, to write a book about Villa Cornaro. The Vicenza organization, called Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio (Andrea Palladio International Center for the Study of Architecture), or CISA, was then in the midst of publishing an ambitious series of books grandly entitled Corpus Palladi-anum, with one volume devoted to each of the structures that Palladio designed and built. The Villa Cornaro volume was delayed, however, and CISA—short of funds—ended its publication of the series after just ten volumes.

We know that the manuscript still exists. Dick Rush says he has a copy but doesn't know where he put it. He speaks a bit critically of it. It has too much information about the Cornaro family, he says, and about the prior history of the area where the villa is located, instead of concentrating exclusively on the villa itself. I begin to realize already that my own life with Villa Cornaro will be different from Dick's. For Dick, the villa is a beautiful glistening object, existing outside of time as an independent thing of beauty and sculptural purity. I am already drawn into the spirit of the villa as an object firmly rooted in its time and place, as a rational product of the bustling, optimistic, triumphant spirit of the Renaissance, and as a living structure that has supported and interacted with Piombino Dese and with the Cornaro family and later families
through hundreds of years. The villa is a great cache of secrets, and I intend to pry out each one. The tenor of Dick's criticism leads me to hope that Doug Lewis is a kindred spirit.

Douglas Lewis has had the brilliant career that every genius should. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., appointed him curator of sculpture and decorative arts when he was just thirty, and he has continued to turn out meticulously researched articles and books ever since, including the definitive book on Palla-dio's drawings. After the collapse of CISAs Corpus Palladianum project, he abstracted the sections with his most provocative discoveries and published them in individual articles in scholarly magazines and collections in the United States, Germany, and Italy.

Carl writes to him as soon as we get back to Atlanta. Doug responds cordially with a copy of the manuscript, as well as offprints of the published articles he derived from it. The manuscript is dense to the point of being impenetrable, but Carl and I soldier away at it. We also spend time reading books and articles on Venetian history and art. By the time April arrives and I pack to leave for two months in Piombino Dese—with Carl to join me in May for the three weeks that he can get away from work—I begin to form in my mind a skeletal history of the villa, with a sense of its role in architecture and the Cornaro family's role in Venetian life.

Yet each new fact that I learn about the past makes my own future seem more complex and confusing. Perhaps more intriguing as well.

9
A
Tale of a Tub

I climb into the long, skinny bathtub and stretch out full-length, my head barely above water. The villa is shuttered for the night. My two guests—friends from Atlanta—are settled in their rooms,
presumably deep in their blankets to escape the cold that envelops the villa and overwhelms the inadequate electric heaters in their bedrooms and mine. I bask luxuriantly in the steamy natural perfume of the well water and watch motionless as the bar of Dove dissolves on my stomach. I am warm for the first time since my friends arrived earlier in the day, blown from the train station to our gate by a frigid April storm. My mind drifts lazily as I try to remember why it is necessary ever to leave this perfect warmth.

Suddenly all the lights of the villa go out as quietly as a candle.

The villa is shuttered tight as a tomb. Not a ray of light from even one streetlamp finds a crevice to peer through. Darkness seizes the villa.

With my mind shocked awake, I begin to review my situation: I am naked, up to my neck in water, in pitch-darkness, in a room where I have personally killed two scorpions within the past three days. My rational mind, in an effort to distract me from the temptation simply to scream in terror, tells me that the three electric heaters, bored by their pretense of producing heat, have merely turned to their favorite activity: overloading the villa's circuits. My mind is teased by two dim memories: first, that Silvana specifically told me where a candle is located in my bedroom, but that I did not pay much attention; and second, that Giacomo specifically showed me where the circuit breakers are located in a small room between the two main floors of the villa—but I didn't pay much attention to that, either. What I remember best is that, in the stairwell of tight circular wooden stairs leading to the small room, I also killed a scorpion yesterday.

Scorpions don't kill, I tell myself.
Note to diary: Learn more about scorpions
. I splash around the bathtub noisily, in the hope of prompting retreat by any scorpion within earshot, then creep out of the tub. I fumble for a towel and feel my way to the bedroom. I pat-search my bureau for the candle. Books, necklace and earrings recently removed, framed photo of Carl (why isn't he here to deal with this mess?), stack of handkerchiefs, no candle. Cross to the
bedside table, like walking on ice cubes. I grasp the brass candlestick! The matches are beside it. After three tries, I ignite one of the damp matches. Light at last. I pick my way to Philip's room and Helen's room and bang on their doors in turn. Philip and Helen laugh at my predicament. Warm in their beds, they're not worried about lights; dawn will come and bring sunlight. I'm not prepared to take such a long view. Turn off your heaters, I tell them; with the load reduced, I should be able to flip the circuit breakers back on. I put on the warmest clothes I can find in the candlelight and, shivering and dodging dripping candle wax, proceed cautiously down the circular stairs toward the kitchen. The fuses and circuit breakers are in the mezzanine room that lies twenty-three steps down, between the two main floors. I find the huge array of electric switches and study each one in turn. Several have clearly flipped off. I reverse the process and am bathed instantly in light from the stairwell.

As I pick my way cautiously up the stairs, which I view as a footpath through a field cleverly booby-trapped with scorpions instead of land mines, I begin doing the arithmetic in my head: The villa is wired for 15 kilowatts of electricity, calculated to be enough for all foreseeable needs. But Helen and Philip have joined me in mid-April of what the television weathermen gleefully and repeatedly call the coldest spring Europe has seen in a hundred years. We plugged in all the villa's three electric radiators and set them on high. Still, there should have been no problem. Then I remember that my running a bath would have started the electric pump at the well that supplies water to the villa. Some lights were on, of course, and who knows what else electrical might have been at work. Anyway, it is clear that we must ration ourselves so as to have just two heaters on at the same time. Maybe we will have to draw lots to see which of the three of us will shut off his or her heater each night.

Scorpions are my first introduction to Piombino Dese wildlife. Dick Rush never told us about the scorpions. I kill fifty-five inside the villa during my first two-month visit. The first one I find lurking
on a window frame in the kitchen the morning after I arrive. As I release the old serpentine iron clasp and pull open the window, this sinister black creature, like a three-inch-long lobster, moves slightly on the right-hand sill. I freeze; it freezes. Then I take off my shoe and whack the beast flat. “Welcome to the NFL,” I mutter.

BOOK: Palladian Days
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