Palladian Days Read online

  “Actually, it's not a bad contract,” Carl comments ruefully. Of course, that doesn't stop him from adding more negative clauses than a porcupine has quills. Some are specific: no rolling tripods or other gear, no direct lights on the frescos, etc. His favorite, however, is broad: If we feel at any time during the filming that some activity may cause harm to the villa, we can stop production on the spot. If the producer and director can fashion an agreeable alternative, filming may resume; otherwise the film company must leave and we will refund its payment.

  “I can't foresee everything bad that might happen,” Carl rationalizes, “but I'll know it when I see it.”

  The producer visits us one day before the filming in order to finalize the contract. To Carl's surprise, the producer accepts all Carl's changes, with just one minor clarification. In fact, he has a different worry in mind. The director of the film has just told him that an actress is needed to portray a cook in the kitchen scene. In reviewing the script, he has decided that the owner of such a grand house would not be cooking by herself; she would supervise a household cook instead. Note to diary: Explain to Carl how life should follow art.

  “Can you suggest any local person for this role?” the producer asks.

  The answer is obvious to both Carl and me: Silvana, your moment of fame has arrived! She requires some encouragement, but soon agrees.

  When the crew members break for lunch on the day of filming to devour a huge basket of sandwiches and sweets ordered from Caffe Palladio, they invite us to join them on the front portico. We are left wondering whether the amount of wine consumed by the crew will be reflected in the final print—and whether for good or ill.

  At precisely 1:00 p.m., a tall and svelte brunette enters the villa with an unassuming stride. She is followed by a second woman bearing a small, well-worn valise. The director introduces us to Virginia Castellano, the film's star. She disappears into our Moses room, still followed by her companion, who proves to be her dresser and makeup artist. Two men position themselves at the camera stations. Soon Signora Castellano emerges, wearing a large white paper collar to protect her clothing from her fresh makeup. She walks briskly to the kitchen, says “Buon giorno” to Silvana and the director, turns, and faces the camera.

  “Allora,” she says—a word best translated in these circumstances as “Let's get this show on the road.”

  The scene has scant dialogue, all spoken by Signora Castellano, but the filming of it requires numerous trips to my refrigerator, as Silvana and the movie star concoct at least eight cakes in as many camera “takes.” The director is not satisfied by the light, or the star's visibility behind the island, or the tilt of her chin, or where Silvana stands. A plane roars overhead during a perfect take, rattling the cameraman's concentration; a truck along Via Roma screeches during another shot. Finally, the kitchen scene is complete. Silvana's work is finished and she leaves, apologizing for using up all my eggs, milk, and flour.

  It is the second cameraman's turn. As he stands in his appointed doorway, the tall actress tilts her head as if hearing a telephone ring, then walks quickly through the dining room and into the grand salon. She picks up the phone receiver from the central table and says “Pronto. Ready” (the Italian telephone greeting). Silence for two minutes. The director calls, “Bene. Ancora una volta, per favor el Good. One more time, please.” Signora Castellano returns to the kitchen and repeats her walk. Five times she does this and we see no difference in her gait, in her facial expression or her hand movements. Later I learn that the character, upon picking up the phone in the grand salon, receives word of her daughter's death in an auto accident. During the two minutes of silence in the grand salon, the camera had recorded the grief transforming her face.

  The third scene, in the park, is merely transitional. The company completes it in a heartbeat. That's it, they're finished. Everybody leaves, offering us thanks and a large check.

  Silvana looks beautiful in her role.

  44

  Murano Magic

  My first step into the swirl of gaudy tourists that always crowds Piazza di San Marco comes on a brilliant June day in 1984, three years before we first see Villa Cornaro. A long weekend in Venice caps our family's three-week sojourn at a tangerine-tinted farmhouse outside Florence. It is my first visit ever to Italy.

  As we admire the vast, brilliantly colored playground of San Marco, a deeply tanned hawker plucks us abruptly from the crowd with an insistent “Glass? You want to see beautiful glass? We go to Murano! Free boat ride!”

  The glass doesn't appeal but the motoscafo ride does, especially to sons Carl and Jim, whose scant years—they're fifteen and twelve—have not held enough boat rides to suit them. Soon the five of us clamber aboard our new friend's James Bond-like craft and roar off through teal-and-silver spume to Murano.

  Seven minutes after boarding, we coast into the dock of a three-story warehouse and showroom on Murano. Murano, we learn, is the collective name for a group of five small islands in the lagoon north of Venice. There has been glassblowing in the lagoon since at least as early as 750, but in 1291 the Grand Council ordered all glassmakers to move their furnaces to Murano. The reason, they said, was to put an end to the destructive fires that the furnaces periodically unleashed upon the city, but a second reason may have been to isolate and thus protect the secret glassmaking technology that the artisans had amassed.

  Our host leads us up long steps to the top floor of the warehouse. A brightly lighted salon explodes before us with shimmering objects in colored glass and cristallo: one room is a vast bestiary of dramatically posed animals; another is devoted to chandeliers and lamps. There is a room for tableware and one for human figures and flowers. Our children are entranced by shelf upon shelf of glass fish. The glass sparkles like an ocean aquarium teeming with mackerel and tarpon and salmon.

  One special fourteen-inch-tall vase catches our eye. Its irregular oval shape begs to be caressed; its gray, white, and cerulean colors evoke a dark but placid sky.

  “An exceptional piece,” the salesclerk comments, when he sees where our eyes have settled. “It is designed by the master glass-blower Seguso.”

  “Archimede Seguso!” I exclaim in wonder; he is the only glass-blower I have heard of.

  “Livio Seguso,” the clerk says.

  “They work together?” I ask hopefully.

  “No, but they are related,” he says apologetically, adding “All the Segusos are related.” He watches my reaction. “Livio Seguso is very highly regarded, a great master.”

  Though we are not convinced that Livio Seguso is the Picasso of glassmaking, Carl and I cannot resist his vase. It has sat on our dining-room buffet in Atlanta ever since. Each year we admire its colors more. Occasionally when I pass it I offer a silent thank-you to the aggressive promoter who picked us from the mass of tourists that June day in Piazza di San Marco.

  For the sake of argument, I'm willing to accept that there may be people who don't love Venetian glass. They may think its colors too garish, its shapes too wild, its surfaces too whimsical, its dragons and dolphins too fantastical. But they should realize that all this embodies the spirit of Venice itself. The spirit of excess in color and decoration, the conviction that no surface can be too rich, too gilded and bejeweled. It is the spirit celebrated in the mosaics and marbles of the Basilica di San Marco, in the rhythmic tracery of the Palazzo Ducale and the gold of Ca’ d'oro.

  I'm pleased that my infatuation with Venetian glass began on Murano itself. It gives me a feeling of satisfaction each time I return to prowl the shops and revisit the historic old Murano Glass Museum. The museum lays out the whole panoply of Murano glassmaking from its earliest history, with works by most of the contemporary masters as well. Napoleone Martinuzzi, Flavio Poli, Dino Martens, Carlo Scarpa—all the legendary designers are displayed in the large second-floor gallery. Added recently on the ground floor, flanking the entranceway with a certain pride of place, are two striking works. One is a creation by Dale Chihuly t
he celebrated American glassmaker who once worked on Murano. The other—a geometric black-and-white tower rising like an op-art lighthouse—is by Livio Seguso.

  One morning begins badly. Instead of catching the early train for an excursion into Venice, we are caught up in details and busywork at the villa.

  The day begins with a long, depressing meeting with Angelo Marconato and his son Stefano. They explain why, when we arrived from Atlanta three days ago for our spring visit, we found the garden of the villa crisscrossed with a labyrinth of trenches that would have stumped Theseus. Connecting the villa to the regional water and sewer systems instead of continuing to rely on our own well and septic tank has proved more complicated than we anticipated when we authorized the project the previous fall. First, we learn that there was a second septic tank—unknown to us—on the side of the villa opposite the sewer connection. Second, an entirely separate system of drains is required for surface water.

  “They didn't dig this much to excavate Pompeii!” Carl exclaims in frustration.

  The rest of the morning slips away in shopping for the evening's dinner and planning for a ricevimento (reception) for performers, friends, and local officials to follow an upcoming concert at the villa. We need an exposure to the sensual feast of Venice to get us out of our grumpy mood, so we catch the 2:34 p.m. train, a jitney of just two cars, both covered in large-scale graffiti. Carl and I view this as vandalism, but an Italian friend offers a different perspective. “Perhaps the young people just need to express themselves,” she says.

  I shudder to think what I would do if a young person had an attack of creativity on the exterior walls of the villa.

  We've just received an announcement of a new glass shop in Campo San Stefano specializing in Murano glass of the nineteenth century. At the Venice train station we catch the No. 82 vaporetto all the way to the Accademia. We cross the Accademia Bridge over the Grand Canal, jostling our way through the tourists, and walk quickly to our destination.

  Like a child on his first visit to Toys “R” Us, we pause to marvel at the treasures displayed in the shopwindow. Bizarre glass dragons cling to the sides of pitchers in brilliant variegated pinks and limes; a broad round cristallo plate cradles a half dozen or so pieces of beguiling glass fruit; a large amber glass fish balances on its fins with its tail thrust high above and its mouth open as though singing.

  The interior of the shop is small, perhaps two hundred square feet, and its shelves are suitably crowded with pieces as exotic as those in the window. Surely the motto of nineteenth-century Murano glassmakers must have been “Too much is not enough.”

  The shop manager—whose name, we later learn, is Puccio—is sitting behind a small desk when we enter, but promptly rises to greet us. We are to learn in the course of subsequent visits and research that Puccio is one of the great experts on early Murano glass. He discourses easily on the items that catch our eye, lavadita (finger bowls), calici (goblets), brocche (ewers). I am distracted, however, by what I see on the desk where he has been working: open sheets of musical staff paper. Several sheets are filled with handwritten musical notation.

  “You must be a musician,” I comment.

  “Yes,” he replies diffidently. “I'm a composer.”

  I explain that I am a church musician myself. He responds enthusiastically, “Would you like to hear something I've written?”

  With our encouragement he produces a CD player from the shelf behind him and treats us to a ten-minute musical interlude. Puccio was one of several Venetian musicians commissioned to produce works for a recent musical gala, we learn. His contribution was the piano composition that we hear now. I admire the three-part work very much. Some of it is cantabile, like a Chopin nocturne; other sections are percussive and repetitive in a Stravinskian manner. I would like to hear it again, but Puccio immediately begins telling us about his current project, the manuscript that I spotted on his desk.

  “An opera to be presented next winter,” he says. He rapidly summarizes the plot—so rapidly, in fact, that the only thread of the story I retain is that the protagonist is the lover not only of both women in the story but of the priest as well.

  “Would you like to hear some of it?” he asks. “It is somewhat like Bellini.”

  “Of course,” Carl and I both reply, expecting another CD recording or perhaps an audiotape.

  Puccio surprises us by opening a desk drawer, lifting an electronic keyboard to the desktop, and sitting down before it. Intrigued at the prospect of a piano presentation in the midst of a small Venetian glass shop, we sit in two chairs on the opposite side of the desk. Suddenly, after an opening measure, our host bursts into song—not in a modest voice, but full stage volume. He could fill La Fenice with that voice, which reverberates from the walls of the shop. Carl looks about nervously, as though he fears some of the glass objects might be in danger.

  The multiple characters of the opera do not faze Puccio; he alternates easily between the tenor and contralto roles. At the end of one passage he pauses, asks our reaction, and then launches into the finale of the opera, which he says we will find especially suggestive of Bellini.

  The whole experience is surreal. Why aren't curious crowds pressing through the doorway, I wonder, to hear Puccio's beautiful singing and fascinating music? Carl and I leave finally after abundant thank-yous for the performance. I turn to Carl as the door closes behind us.

  “I love Venice!” I tell him.

  45

  The First of July

  Years pass before I comprehend that the families of Piombino Dese are bound by a grim episode from the past, a shared community memory of a notorious day that seared the life of the town and shaped the way its residents—even those who were born afterward—view the world.

  Why did it take me so long to appreciate the importance of the events of July 1, 1944? The infectious conviviality of the Piombi-nesi hides from newcomers any somber thoughts. Perhaps in the early years my Italian limited what I was hearing. Or maybe, as we have become closer friends, the Piombinesi have allowed their conversation to return more often to that July day.

  I have decided that the major reason may be the oversimplified view that I brought with me as to the role of the Italians in World War II. In my early years in the Veneto I was amused by the recurring celebrations of the Alpini. The Alpini, I heard, were honored as the heroic Italian freedom fighters who fought as partisans to overthrow the yoke of oppression of the German invaders. This seemed to be dealing loosely with history, since I remembered that the Italians and Germans were allies in World War II and remained so until after the Allies had invaded Sicily in July 1943 and were poised to invade the Italian peninsula. On my first trip to Italy in 1984, Carl and I visited the American military cemetery outside Florence to find, amid the thousands of white crosses glistening on the hillside, the grave of my mother's only brother, who died in the bloody landing at Anzio in January 1944.

  In time, however, I learn that my knowledge of Italy in the war was incomplete. The king of Italy forced Benito Mussolini's resignation as prime minister in July 1943 and put him in prison. The cabinet that succeeded Mussolini's surrendered Italy to the Allies, though the action was largely symbolic because the German army surged into Italy to continue the war. The Germans freed Mussolini from prison and set him up as the figurehead leader of a rival Fascist government based at Salo in the north, while the legitimate Italian government declared war on Germany and aligned itself with the Allies. It was in that late period from October 1943 to April 1945—with the front lines of the Germans and Allies mired at first below Rome and later north of Florence—that the Alpini emerged as true partisans in the Alpine region, not the opera buffa figures that I had envisioned.

  Early on the morning of July 1, 1944, German soldiers who had been billeted in the barchessa of the villa and elsewhere in the surrounding area assembled in the center of Piombino Dese. With prepared lists in hand, they dispersed through the town and banged on the doors of families with you
ng men who were thought to be less than fully committed to the Fascist cause.

  The men were brought into the town square at gunpoint and then loaded onto decrepit German trucks bound for northern factories. A young woman with an enormous belly, obviously in the final weeks of pregnancy, burst from a doorway screaming. She ran to one of the trucks and struggled awkwardly to climb aboard. “You must take me, too!” she shrieked, grabbing one of the prisoners. “You can't take my husband alone; you must take me, too!” Madly screaming and crying, impervious to the shouts and imprecations of the German soldiers, she could not be pried from the man she clung to. Finally the German officer in charge threw them both off the truck and ordered the sorry cortege to depart without them.

  Giuseppina tells me this story. The woman was her mother's sister-in-law.

  “They took my father,” Gastone tells me. “He was shipped to Germany for forced labor in the war plants.”

  “He returned after the war?” I ask.

  “Yes, he walked back after the war. He was very, very thin, and he had a long black beard,” he replies. “I'll never forget when I first saw him.”

  “Is he still living?”

  “No, he died years ago. Would you like to see his picture?” Gas-tone reaches for his billfold and produces a small, worn photo of his long-dead father.

  Young Epifanio Marulli, who later became custodian of Villa Cornaro for Dick Rush, happened to be at the parish church on the morning of July 1, helping the priests on some project. He was hiding in the campanile of the church when the Germans banged on the door of his home. They took three of his brothers away to Germany, but never found Epifanio.