Palladian Days Page 12

  25

  Cajfe Palladio

  Piombino Dese families are bound in a sense of dynasty. Businesses pass down through generations within a family. Remo Roncato, the furniture manufacturer and retailer we consulted about our kitchen, began by training with his father as a woodworker. My friend Marina Bighin, who runs a beauty shop in the former barchessa of the villa, is the daughter of a barber. When Mario, our plumber, arrives to make repairs, he is accompanied by his tall, handsome son Stefano, who is learning the trade. Ernesto For-mentin, our geometra, is struggling to transfer his clientele to his son Carlo. Franco Battiston, with his wife, Patrizia, is in charge of the supermercato when his parents Gianni and Bianca travel on their increasingly frequent holidays.

  This provides a strong continuity in the community, but at a cost to the other young people, those whose parents do not own a business. No employee of the supermercato who is not a Battiston is so deluded as to believe that his career might lead to his heading the enterprise. No plant foreman at the Roncato factory, regardless of his aptitude or energy, will rise to become chief executive.

  A young friend tells me of a contemporary who has foolishly trained at the university as a pharmacist. “It is impossible to find work as a pharmacist. Of course, the pharmacy in Piombino Dese hires only members of the family,” she explains.

  “Why not open a new pharmacy?” I ask.

  “Impossible,” she says. “Only one pharmacy license is issued in a town the size of Piombino Dese. The same is true in towns nearby.” So the pharmacist-trained friend is unemployed and searching for other work.

  Yet the entrepreneurial spirit flourishes. More than fifty lamp manufacturers around Piombino Dese, all small and family-owned, have sprung directly or indirectly from a single lamp factory that moved to Piombino Dese from Venice's Giudecca in the mid-1950s. Some employees left that plant to begin their own business, and the process was repeated again and again with lamp plants springing up like oversize mushrooms. Silvana's uncle Nazzareno Mason invites Carl and me to visit his small plant in Ronchi, a village within the comune of Piombino Dese. The factory, built beside his house, is a solid structure the size of about four basketball courts. Nazzareno handles purchasing and sales, embarking on long trips to visit his distributors and dealers in northern and eastern Europe. He has important customers in Japan as well, but in that case it is the customer who must travel to Piombino Dese. Nazzareno's wife, Danila, is in charge of shipping. Nazzareno takes us through the manufacturing area, dominated by a long, wide assembly table. Standing at one end, content to be in the midst of her family, is Nazzareno's eighty-eight-year-old mother. I am not sure she is doing much assembling, but she is cheerfully convinced that she remains a contributing member of the family enterprise. Luca, the son of Nazzareno and Danila, works across the table from his grandmother. To our surprise, Carl and I spot two familiar faces farther along the table: Ilario Mariotto's older daughter, Alessan-dra, and her fiance, Stefano. I did not realize they were employed by Nazzareno.

  “Complimenti,” Carl says to Nazzareno. Business must be very strong to be hiring workers from outside the family!

  Nazzareno never attended university; he moved directly from secondary school to work in the pioneer lamp factory that moved from Venice. Now he heads his own multinational business, surrounded by a multigenerational family and a few close friends, all within seventy-five yards of his own bed.

  Like Nazzareno, Giacomo Miolo grew up in a family with no business to pass along. As the youngest of nine children, eight of them sons, Giacomo would not have found a place in the family business even if there had been one; few small businesses can support eight owners. In the desperate postwar years, Giacomo's family sometimes had trouble finding enough food for their table.

  “Thankfully, a stream passed in front of our house,” Giacomo told me one day. “When we didn't have enough else to eat, my father would catch a fish or a few eels. God fed us and we never went hungry.”

  Giacomo grew up in Torreselle, a nearby village which like Ronchi is part of the comune of Piombino Dese. After meeting and marrying Silvana, a Piombino Dese girl, Giacomo managed to obtain a job with Gianni Battiston, who operated an eleven-room hotel and bar across Via Roma from Villa Cornaro. Giacomo and Silvana began building their own home on the bank of the Drag-onzolo in a new development just a half mile upstream from the villa. Assisted by Giacomo's brothers, they built the house themselves, working on weekends. Carl speculates that Giacomo chose the site on a stream with the thought that it might feed his family if hard times return.

  In a fortuitous turn of events, Gianni Battiston decided that the grocery business held more promise than running an obsolete hotel. He and Bianca built a grocery on the ground floor of the villa's former barchessa, beneath their own apartment. The store was little larger than a typical corner grocery of former times in the United States, but several times larger than the tiny alimentari, fruttivendoli, and macellerie from which Piombinesi, like all Italians, had been buying their packaged goods, vegetables, and meats for generations. One-stop shopping had arrived in Piombino Dese. The Battiston store, a quick success, was soon alive with shoppers— mostly women—their chatter spinning off the plaster walls like the drone of cicadas at dusk. The Battistons scurried to help customers find exactly what they wanted. And alimentari and fruttivendoli in town began to close.

  Gianni offered to sell the hotel and bar to Giacomo on time. Owning one's own business is the Valhalla of every Italian family, so Giacomo and Silvana jumped at the opportunity, even though the hotel trade continued to dwindle just as Gianni had foreseen. Giacomo and Silvana managed to make a living from it and pay off their debt, but by 1988—just as the Battistons were preparing to move to their new and enlarged supermercato two blocks away—they had reached a crossroads. Giacomo decided he had to expand the hotel to an economical size or close it and concentrate on the bar. Bankers resolved the issue for him. “They would not lend me the money to expand the hotel,” Giacomo explains. “I think they were right.”

  Silvana and Giacomo Miolo at Caffe Palladio

  Giacomo simply makes the best of Plan B. He will develop the grandest caffe in Piombino Dese. His new Caffe Palladio will be more than a dark, smoky room in which to drink and play cards. He retains Renato Rizzi, a Venetian architect-interior designer. Renato—the same Renato who later designs my kitchen at the villa—transforms the homely rectangle into a flowing pattern filled with curves. A handsome and functional bar springs from one wall in a semicircle, facing intimate circular banquettes for seating clusters of two to five customers. More tables, half hidden at the rear, lead to small terrace tables in a courtyard behind the caffe. Elegant, lightly stained pearwood is used throughout, trimmed with aqua stripes above the bar and banquettes and complemented by subdued rose and aqua upholstery. Light flooding from large street-side windows and from modernistic sconces dances back from a mirrored wall opposite the bar.

  There are eleven caff es, bars, pasticcerie, and gelaterie within a radius of one kilometer from Caffe Palladio and more beyond that, all competing in at least some part of their business. At the cost of an enormous bank debt, Giacomo raises the standard by which they will be judged—much as Gianni Battiston has done with his new supermercato.

  The renovation takes longer and costs more than Giacomo foresees, but he nonetheless reopens with a bold policy: card playing is prohibited. With a stroke, he has driven away half the clientele of his former bar, the old men of the town who gather in the afternoons and evenings for endless hands of briscola or scopa, occupying a lot of table space while spending little. Giacomo realizes that his new caffe must find other, freer-spending customers.

  Under his new regime, Silvana opens the bar at 5:00 a.m. Her first customers are truck drivers passing through on the nearly deserted streets of early morning. By 8:00 a.m. men and women walking to their offices or to the train station have begun to queue up for an espresso and a brioche. Late morning brings mothers (and somet
imes grandmothers) with babies, and a few older men in search of conversation and a morning grappa. Giacomo arrives to assist Silvana with the lunchtime crowd, when demand expands for panini and tramezzini (sandwiches). In early afternoon Leonardo, eighteen years old and already launched on the course of succeeding to the family business, relieves his parents, who return home for a long riposo. The afternoon is lightly trafficked, though I notice a distinct concentration of teenage girls gathering after school. The reason for this small surge is obvious to me, though Carl doesn't get it right away: Leonardo is one of the best-looking young men in the Veneto, if not all of Italy.

  All of the daylight hours are only a prelude; the caffe awakes at night. Throngs of young people from fourteen to thirty years old stream in: girls in breathlessly tight blue jeans and midriff-baring tops, young men with day-old beards and wearing designer sunglasses perched above their foreheads, all glittering in earrings, some men with hair longer than the women, others shaved bald. Giacomo's new Caffe Palladio is the place to be. The crowd spills out onto the sidewalk, everyone gesticulating madly like floor traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Couples romantically inclined drift toward the rear terrace for quieter conversation.

  Caffe Palladio is a combination social club and finishing school for teenagers and young adults. Giacomo is host and social director.

  “It's the Italian equivalent of the corner of Main and Pleasant Streets in Littleton, New Hampshire, when I was growing up— only the caffe is warmer and better lighted,” I tell Carl.

  “Not at all,” Carl replies. “It's the Piggy Park Drive-In in Charleston in the fifties.”

  Giacomo likes young people and they sense it. He doesn't permit loud and obnoxious behavior—Leonardo thinks his father is too insistent sometimes—and he keeps track of how much the young people are drinking. Occasionally he counsels on love lives and unemployment. His care is not always enough. One morning he awakes to learn that two young men who left his caffe at midnight in sober condition have died in an automobile accident four hours later in a town forty miles away. The carabinieri reconstruct the events and find that the men stopped for long stays at two bars in towns along the route. Giacomo's sadness is as obvious as it was on the death of his brother.

  With his white-swathed head, Giacomo looks like a Sikh. A sick Sikh. His face, mottled purple, shocks us with its brilliant color against the white hospital sheets. He's okay, he murmurs quietly, just a concussion; he'll be up and around in ten days, the doctor says.

  Earlier this late June evening he was tending bar at Caffe Palla-dio, his mind occupied by the thought that young Riccardo, now thirteen years old, is leaving with us tomorrow to spend a month in Atlanta. A village ne'er-do-well, nursing a beer, put his head down on one of the small round tables. Giacomo knew that the young man was out of work and had problems with drugs and with keeping a job. He approached, sat down, and tried to talk with the youth about employment leads. No answer. Again Giacomo tried to prompt a reaction, but got none. Giacomo at last asked him to sit up or to leave the caffe. As Giacomo stood and turned to walk away, the young man lurched up from the table, spun Giacomo around without warning, and landed a cracking right fist to his jaw. Giacomo fell backward and might have escaped serious harm if his head had not struck one of the round marble tables as he fell. The youth fled and someone summoned an ambulance from the hospital in Camposampiero.

  Will Riccardo come with us or not? We have planned for a year now to take him on a visit to the States, his first trip outside Italy and his first plane flight. (Giacomo and Silvana hope Riccardo will practice the English he has been studying in school.) Of course Riccardo is coming! But he promises to phone his father from Atlanta once he arrives.

  Riccardo is the ten-year-old child who helped me unpack that first spring of 1990; the eleven-year-old boy who produced a single golf club and solitary golf ball the next year and challenged me to a golf game in our park; the twelve-year-old kid who struggled not to cry one year later when his pet kitten escaped the caffe and perished beneath the wheels of a passing semi.

  He coaches me in Italian when I ask him to, but is so well mannered he wouldn't dream of correcting me unless I request it.

  He lends me his schoolbooks so that I can study the advanced tenses and recommends a book he thinks I'll like.

  He tells me funny stories about local characters, always smiling when he admits they are molto cattivi—very naughty.

  He's my fourth child.

  The morning following Giacomo's hospitalization, Riccardo stands in our kitchen ready to depart: all five skinny feet of him, dressed in tennis shoes, navy shorts, and a new blue-and-white-striped shirt. His grin, usually four inches wide, has stretched to at least five; his black eyes glow, his black cowlick quivers with excitement.

  “Sono pronto, signora Sally. Andiamo! I'm ready. Let's go!” We pile into the Miolos’ Fiat Lancia, and Leonardo drives us to Marco Polo Airport.

  An overnight stop in London is required, because in our early years in Piombino Dese it is not possible to fly from Venice to Atlanta in one day. Riccardo is wowed by the minibar and huge TV in his room, adjoining ours, but he is dismayed by the homeless and the poor begging at street intersections.

  Riccardo boards our transatlantic flight the next day with the nonchalance of a jaded world traveler, pulling books and games from his backpack, examining every publication in the seat pocket. He orders a Coke and settles in.

  Squirrels and the swimming pool: those are his favorite Atlanta things. A scoiattolo—squirrel—scampers ahead of us as the taxi turns into our driveway. Riccardo wants to chase it and I wish him luck. Then his attention is diverted to the swimming pool; a stern voice is necessary to drag him away for a late supper and bed.

  Giacomo and Silvana have given Riccardo some spending money for his trip, which he immediately spends in its entirety on an amazing treasure: a Nintendo Game Boy.

  Fortunately we have enrolled Riccardo in a two-week soccer day camp, which pulls him away for more exercise and companionship than the Game Boy affords. Although the camp introduces him to other boys of his age, his imperfect English and guileless, unsophisticated nature seem to hamper his efforts to establish long-term friendships. He finishes camp without any pen pals.

  We want Riccardo to see more of the United States than Atlanta, so we drive him north to New Hampshire to visit my parents, a long two-day drive that provides Riccardo a sort of moving film of America. “Troppe automobili. Too many cars,” is Riccardo's summary of the trip. But he loves the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and my mother's ginger cookies and her roast beef. And he especially loves the town park, where he clambers with other children on the monkey bars and pumps the swing so high I fear he'll sail off into the pine trees. He invites all of his new friends back to “Grammy's house.” They come en masse for cookies and milk and for board games on the front porch. My mother and Riccardo are equally happy.

  Ashley Gable shows Riccardo Miolo the sights of Washington, D.C.

  Riccardo telephones me after he arrives back in Italy. I had thoughtlessly given him no pocket money for the flight home; he had missed his connection in Frankfurt, so another boy had bought him a snack while they waited for a later flight to Venezia. He is glad to be home.

  26

  The Fugitive Funghi

  During cool September nights, special white mushrooms sprout at the foot of the Lombardy poplars that line the east and west sides of our villa's park. They lie like little handkerchiefs that capricious fairies might have dropped silently in the night. Mushrooms from a grocery are delicious; I joyfully devour them whether tiny, tall, or stringy, gray or black, raw, fried, or sauteed. On the other hand, a mushroom in the outdoors is a fungus of no more value to me than mildew in my closet. As a result, I am slow to appreciate the passions unleashed by the intermittent arrival of pioppini in our park.

  In fact, the recurrent fungus growth at the base of our poplars proves to be a phenomenon known in wide circles of Piombine
si, the way you would know that a vein of gold runs through your neighbor's property or that your neighbor's field has a corner rich in truffles. Pioppini, I am to learn, are prized as an exotic and savory addition to risotto or stew.

  After opening the shutters of the villa one morning, Silvana joins me in the kitchen, where I am munching my usual brioche for breakfast and picking my way through yesterday's newspaper. My morning chats with Silvana are a highlight of my day.

  “Have you noticed the funghi that have sprung up at the poplars?” Silvana asks.

  I have indeed noticed them. In fact, I have assumed that they are a new symptom of the old age and general bad health of the poplars, which are nearing the end of their normal life span.

  “Will you be gathering them?” she continues.

  “I view collecting mushrooms the way I view Russian roulette,” I try to explain, though the vocabulary is beyond my abilities. Given a choice among nine delicious funghi and a single poisonous one, I am sure I would select the killer.

  “In that case, may Giacomo and I gather them?” Silvana asks. She explains to me the flavorful qualities of pioppini.

  “Sono tuoil They're yours!” I quickly assure her. Late in the evening she returns to the park with Giacomo. Together they collect several large paper-bagfuls of the mushrooms.

  Several weeks later a new crop of mushrooms appears, as abundant as the first. Alas, when she and Giacomo arrive in the evening to harvest them, the mushrooms have entirely vanished, every one of them. Silvana discloses the mysterious disappearance to me somewhat cautiously the next morning. She may wonder if I have changed my mind, now that I know more about the delectable crop. Perhaps I have secreted the mushrooms away myself. She avoids saying that the mushrooms have been stolen, contenting herself with the observation that they have been “taken.”