Palladian Days Read online

  After fifty years, continual problems are to be expected, Ernesto says. We might postpone installing a new roof, but it will be necessary within the next few years in any event.

  Given a choice between spending money now and spending it later, Carl and I generally opt for later. Moreover, while we are still trying to digest the cost of my magnificent new kitchen, it is especially important that we hold off on major expenses for as long as possible. We are acutely aware of the fact that Carl is not receiving a paycheck now. In this case, however, because of the safety issues, we decide to move ahead right away. Neither of us wants Ilario out on the roof—with or without a safety line.

  “Right away” proves to be a more flexible concept than we imagined.

  Nothing can be done without permission from the Soprinten-dente di Belle Arti in Venice. Villa Cornaro is a registered national monument in Italy, as well as one of about five hundred monuments on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Prior approval of the Soprintendente is required before any construction is undertaken at the villa, even a project that would seem like ordinary maintenance, such as repair or replacement of the roof. Ernesto prepares the formal application, complete with amazingly detailed drawings and specifications of the project. We've heard tales of mindless delays at the hands of the Soprintendente's office, so we prepare for a long wait.

  A short while later, Ernesto surprises us with news that the Soprintendente himself wishes to pay us a visit and inspect the villa personally. The matter of a new roof is something that would never ordinarily rise to the level of receiving the Soprintendente's personal attention. The current Soprintendente, however, is rather new in his office; perhaps he has simply decided to acquaint himself with one of the prominent structures under his jurisdiction.

  24

  The Soprintendente

  The Soprintendente is charming. He makes an immediate friend of Carl by speaking English with him. We are both impressed by his genuine interest in the smallest details of the villa, since we are obsessed with them ourselves.

  He cheerfully explores the cantina with us, where we discuss the pros and cons of whitewashing its walls every spring to hide the blotches of mildew that build up during the winter. Dick Rush was a confirmed whitewasher, but Carl and I decided at the outset that we preferred to have a more natural look in the cantina, whose vaulted bays had been filled with winemaking casks until the church acquired the property in 1951. We suspended the annual whitewashing. Now the accumulated layers of whitewash are beginning to flake away and the deep red of the original brick is emerging.

  “Much healthier without the whitewash,” the Soprintendente assures us. “It allows the bricks to breathe.”

  He saves his greatest enthusiasm for the villa's graffiti. Like all of Palladio's villas, Villa Cornaro is built of brick, not stone. But the brick is covered with a pale, mellow-toned stucco or plaster intonaco that is scored to create the look of Istrian stone. Villa Cornaro is the only one of Palladio's villas to retain its original intonaco, so Palladio's original conception of the proper color for a villa has been preserved. The intonaco of Palladio's villas, once lost, is virtually impossible to reproduce because its appearance does not come from pigment; the intonaco is a mixture of sand, ground glass, and marble bits, along with who knows what else, that defies attempts to reproduce the luminous glow that it radiates in sunlight.

  Preservation of the original intonaco at Villa Cornaro has also preserved remarkable tokens of life in the Cornaro family in the seventeenth century: the villa, especially on the more protected south facade, is covered with dozens of graffiti. Most of them record family news items.

  Adi 12 marzo 1623

  fu fatto savio di ordini il re Sig’ Francesco On 12 March 1623

  illustrious Signor Francesco was made a Minister of the Marine

  Here's another:

  Adi 13 zugno 1620

  naque Susanna fig lm di me Andrea Corner ed era la festa di San Antonio da Padua giorno di sabatto ad ora di nove On 13 June 1620 was born Susanna, the daughter of me, Andrea Cornaro, and it was the feast day of Saint Anthony of Padua, on Saturday, at the hour of nine

  One notation is chilling even after three hundred years:

  1690 9 novembre

  Io franc” Corner venni a star a Piombino p il sospetto del contagio ehe fu a Venae mi fermo fin del 4 Gennio sequente 9 November 1690

  I, Francesco Cornaro, came to stay at Piombino because of the fear of plague that existed at Venice, and remained until the following 4 January

  Sally explains to visitors some graffiti on the south portico

  “Incredibile!” the Soprintendente exclaims. He bounces excitedly from one graffito to another. “Has anyone written about this?” he asks.

  “There's nothing that we know of,” I reply.

  We show him the earliest dated one: 1608. Not completely legible, it seems to record the election of a Cornaro son to the Grand Council.

  “Incredibile!” he continues to exclaim at regular intervals. Together we marvel that the family was writing on the walls of its proud villa less than twenty years after the final touches were put on it. Would other Palladian villas display such memoirs of villa life if their intonaco had not been lost?

  The second marvel is that something written outdoors in the same period that the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock has remained legible today.

  “This is written in sanguigna,” the Soprintendente concludes. His nose is practically touching the writing as he examines it. “It's an old writing medium made of a compound that includes ox-blood. That's what gives it that reddish color.” We speculate that maybe there has been a chemical bonding between the writing medium and the wall surface. That might explain the survival of the graffiti.

  There is more writing on the walls in the attic. Some of it records how many sacks of grain were stored in different rooms in particular years in the seventeenth century. Then there are fanciful drawings of ducks, of dragons, of the villa itself, of young dandies with plumed hats and period shoes. Another room has scribbles by soldiers billeted there in World War I. The walls of the attic are like a scrapbook of the villa's life.

  Before the Soprintendente leaves, Carl springs on him a new subject. Since we first bought the villa, Carl has cast a baleful eye on two rows of six cypress trees running in parallel lines down the center of the park from the south steps of the villa. Carl objects that the trees block the view of the villa from the south and that the problem will get worse as the trees—now about twelve feet tall— continue to grow.

  The Soprintendente agrees with Carl. By fall, the trees are history, uprooted by Ilario's hardy tractor.

  • • •

  In June we have lunch with Douglas Lewis in a busy restaurant near his office at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Carl, with satisfaction, tells Doug what he plans with the cypresses. Doug bursts into loud laughter, tinged perhaps with a certain air of relief.

  “I did the same thing!” he exclaims. “When I was writing my book about the villa, back in 1975, Dick and Julie kindly allowed me to stay at the villa. They weren't there. They said I should feel free to do whatever work I thought was in the best interest of the villa.”

  Doug pauses for effect. “So I had those same cypresses pulled out. They didn't belong there at all. Well, Julie was furious when she found out about it. Seems she planted them herself and loved them.”

  “But they are still there,” I object.

  “That's just it,” Doug says, laughing again. “Julie replanted them! What you are taking out are her replacements.”

  Carl and I smile at each other. A good day's work, we are thinking.

  “I'm so pleased they're gone,” Doug adds.

  Permission to redo the roof arrives in the fall. With trepidation, we set about finding an impresa (contractor) for the work.

  There are three obvious candidates. First is Mario Formentin, the man on whom Dick Rush always relied for projects at the villa. Mario is the brother of Er
nesto Formentin, the geometra who is our engineer on the project. The second possibility is Angelo Mar-conato, a longtime employee of Mario who broke away to set up his own firm a few years earlier. Angelo has performed two small tasks for us at the villa, but I had not realized that he did big roofing jobs as well. Then I learned that he recently finished reroofing the local church—a roof even bigger than the villa's and requiring the same old-style tiles. The third candidate is the one we know best, Franco Ferraro. Franco is the father of Lorella, the promising young ballerina who so impressed us in the recital at the villa the previous year.

  Carl and I meet with each of them and discuss the work. They all agree that, because of the weather, work during the winter is not feasible. We must look to the following spring to begin.

  Soon their preventivi (estimates) begin to arrive. The estimates vary widely; the lowest is 50 percent higher than we expected and the highest is 50 percent higher than that. One submits a very professional preventive and is completely out of our price range. Another is low bidder, but we notice immediately that he has omitted one important cost item that both of the others have included. We assume that the missing item will not be overlooked when it comes time to pay, which means that the estimate, which had originally seemed attractive, was only slightly better than Angelo's, the middle bid. We worry that there might be other overlooked items in the low bid that we have failed to catch. We are also reminded that Angelo is the only one of the three with whom we have had actual experience, and that the work he did—albeit a small job— was professional and timely. We give Angelo the nod.

  We arrive in Piombino Dese on May 1 the following spring expecting to see the villa cloaked in scaffolding. The only sign of activity as we pull into the yard is Ilario driving our immense lawn mower in long sweeps around the broad south lawn, now unencumbered by excess cypresses.

  Where is Angelo? I phone him immediately and he appears at our door early the next morning.

  “Why haven't you begun?” I ask excitedly.

  “May is too rainy,” Angelo replies calmly. “We will begin in June.”

  “The comedy begins,” Carl mutters to me in English.

  “When in June will you begin?” Carl asks.

  Angelo pulls from his pocket a small diary and flips its pages. “Wednesday, June 3,” he responds carefully.

  Later Carl and I review the conversation. “At least he didn't just say ‘early June,’ “ Carl observes.

  “You're grasping at straws,” I reply.

  All is quiet until Tuesday, June 2. The bell at the street rings while we are sitting at breakfast. Angelo is at the front gate. He asks us to unlock the service gate to the west so he can pull his truck in. Soon he and three others are unloading large frames of scaffolding from the truck and assembling them along the north facade of the villa, where their roofing work is to begin. “Why are you a day early?” I ask. He said he would begin work on June 3, he explains. You can't begin work if you don't have your scaffolding in place.

  Carl and I look at each other in some puzzlement. We seem to have found a new life-form: an entirely reliable builder.

  Angelo is a man in his early fifties, with weathered skin. He has an average build and an ambling gait that suggests muscles accustomed to being sore from hard manual labor. The three young men who climb down from the truck and set to work with him would be finalists in an Angelo Marconato look-alike contest, except that they are a generation younger and half a head taller, and seem carved from steel.

  “My sons,” Angelo says, pointing to each of them in turn. “Stefano, Paolo, and Fabiano.”

  They are on the roof from morning to night, pausing only for riposo in the early afternoon. They appear five days a week without fail. We watch as their work moves in sectors across the broad roof.

  They work to salvage as many of the old handmade tegole as possible, because the new replacement tiles are machine-made and have a different profile, at least on close inspection. I'm not sure that with a roof as high as the villa's, the difference is perceptible from the ground. Nonetheless, Angelo appears one morning with Ernesto Formentin to make a special request. They are concerned that the machine-made tile will be noticeable along the ridgeline. They request authority to incur the extra cost for handmade tiles to install there. Carl reluctantly agrees.

  We return to Atlanta for July and August, confident that we have left the villa in conscientious hands. The following weekend, July Fourth, Ashley flies down from Washington, D.C., to welcome us home and get updated on our stay in Italy. She has just completed her first year at law school and is working for the summer at a Washington law firm. She is primed to ply us with confidence-building questions:

  “Who is this Angelo?”

  “If the villa collapses, do you sue here or in Italy?”

  A few weeks later, alarming news arrives from Ernesto, faxed along with more of his meticulous drawings. Angelo has discovered a serious structural problem.

  A previously undetected leak in the roof beside the south portico has been dumping rainwater onto two important beams. One of them, a roof beam, is rotten beyond repair. Fortunately, it can be accessed and replaced easily from above while the roof tiles are removed. The second beam is much trickier. As I try to understand the problem, I learn more than I ever thought I'd need to know about how a Palladian villa was built. Ernesto's drawings show that the second-floor columns are joined together by an enormous beam laid across the tops of their capitals. Architects call that beam an architrave. The architraves at Villa Cornaro are covered in intonaco, just like the rest of the exterior. Underneath the intonaco, however, is not brick—as in the walls of the structure—or stone, but wood. The entire architrave is a big wooden beam. Plain straw is tacked to the beam and the intonaco applied on top. The straw acts as a lath to provide a good bond between the beam and the stucco. I marvel that this wood, straw, and stucco sandwich has survived almost 450 years, supporting an entablature and pediment that weigh tons.

  Ernesto tells us that the hidden leak Angelo found has allowed water to seep under the intonaco and weaken one end of the architrave. Angelo has removed the intonaco along the full length of the architrave to inspect the whole beam. The damage is confined to just five feet at the west end. Faxes and phone calls fly back and forth between us and Ernesto. He reassures us: Angelo will simply remove the weakened part of the beam and splice a new segment in its place. The Soprintendente's office has already approved the remedy.

  My mind reels trying to imagine how all the weight above will be supported—more than seventy feet in the air—while the new beam is inserted. Carl says we should think of it like sausage making: something we don't want to know too much about.

  Is Angelo qualified to do the work? we ask—perhaps an impolitic question. After all, we first met Angelo just two years earlier while he was installing kitchen tile.

  “Of course,” Ernesto responds. Carl and I discuss our options and decide there aren't any. We authorize Angelo to proceed, realizing that we have no idea what the work will cost, and no insurance coverage if the whole facade collapses into a heap of rubble while the repair is in progress.

  Silence. Weeks pass with no further report. We warily check our fax machine each morning.

  “If anything went wrong, they would have told us,” Carl reassures me. His voice has no conviction. Finally, I telephone Ernesto.

  “Oh, that was finished two weeks ago,” he responds casually. “Nessun problema.” He seems surprised that I felt any anxiety about something so routine.

  Ernesto has a new suggestion. While the scaffolding is in place, we should ask a restoration firm based in Padua to examine the Corinthian capitals at the top of the second-floor columns and make us a proposal for restoring them. The Corinthian capitals on the south facade of the villa are, we are reminded, atypically made of terra-cotta. Although stone would have been more durable, Pal-ladio chose terra-cotta because it could be worked into more delicate foliage shapes at lower cost.

/>   Carl and I agree to Ernesto's suggestion only after repeated assurances that the Padua firm will not charge for the evaluation.

  September brings us back to Piombino Dese with great trepidation for our villa and our bank account. The villa, we quickly determine, is in great repair. The new roof is completed, although the scaffolding still embraces the south facade of the villa while the architrave is being re-stuccoed.

  Ernesto arranges for the two principals from the Padua restoration firm to visit one morning. Together with Angelo, who joins us, we clamber up a long series of carefully secured ladders to a scaffolding deck at the level of the capitals. The second-floor porch is a distant thirty feet below us. At close range I perceive that the capitals—which seem of modest size when viewed from below—are nearly as tall as I am. The terra-cotta curlicues are more intricate and fragile than I imagined them to be from a distance.

  “These capitals are like four-hundred-fifty-year-old flowerpots,” Carl comments.

  The restorers show us the damage to some of them and tell us how they would stabilize and repair them. They leave behind with us a detailed proposal, including convincing before-and-after photographs of similar jobs they have done in the past. Their price for the work is reasonable. In fact, there is only one argument against retaining them immediately, while the scaffolding is still in place: We can't afford it.

  We've found that the unforeseen repairs will add 50 percent to the original estimated cost of the roof project. In light of the extra work required, it seems a bargain—a costly bargain.