Palladian Days Read online

  Hard work, Ilario admits, but he won't dwell on the hardship. “We were paid by what we cut, so we could set our own pace,” he says. Ilario, I am sure, set a torrid pace.

  Ilario eats so slowly! And Giovannina so fast! Before Ilario has finished his spezzatino, Giovannina begins slicing the pear torte I brought as dessert.

  For a young man whose whole life has been consumed in cultivating a single circumscribed parcel of land, the wrench of leaving the land and boarding a ship and then a plane en route to a remote country on the opposite side of the globe must have been excruciating, the anxiety belied now by Ilario's calm in speaking of it. In fact, Ilario's father had made a move different in scale but perhaps comparable in emotional impact. Ilario's family lived and worked first in Loreggia, about four miles away from Piombino Dese. By researching in the parish records of Loreggia, Ilario has established that his family had lived there from at least as early as 1636. The family probably spent all those centuries as mezzadri, sharecroppers, working a single plot of ground. In 1938, however, the landowner, Mario Vianello—who also owned Villa Cornaro and its surrounding land—asked Ilario's father to remove his family to Piombino Dese to take over farming a parcel that had become available here. Ilario's father bravely accepted the offer, impelled perhaps by having too many children to survive on the parcel in Loreggia. While a farmhouse was being built for the family in Piombino Dese, they lived upstairs in the barchessa of the villa, approximately in the section where Marina Bighin now lives above her beauty shop. And it was there, above the stable, that Ilario was born.

  “Will your grandchildren continue to farm the land?” I ask Ilario.

  “Perhaps,” he replies. “But they must attend university first.”

  14

  La Cucina

  What did the Rushes eat in Piombino Dese?

  Not much, I conclude, peering into the large, grim room masquerading as a kitchen. A propane stove with two burners squats forlornly along the south wall, flanked by a primitive refrigerator. There's no sink or running water; that's in the adjacent laundry room. The west wall is filled by a hovering terra-cotta hood from the early 1900s. Below the hood is the masonry work for the low counter that Julie once commissioned but abandoned before completion. With the shutters closed in the evening, rays from the single bulb of the hanging central fixture struggle to light the long, narrow table directly below and are frustrated completely by the gloomy shadows that shroud the pale blue walls. Yet against the north wall, serene and magnificent, stands in unlikely contrast an eighteenth-century French armoire, its beauty and dignity undi-minished by having been turned to use as a dish cupboard.

  Since the propane stove would be challenged to cook a midsize hamburger patty, it is obvious that Julie and Dick looked elsewhere for nourishment. Silvana confirms to me that she and Elena Marulli frequently prepared dishes for the Rushes at their own homes and brought the meals to the villa. Julie also relied on takeout items from Alimentari Battiston next door. Julie just didn't cook.

  I, on the other hand, like to cook. Visions of grand feasts of Italian cuisine color my dreams. Raising three children makes any mother a master of spaghetti; now I'm poised for grander heights. I buy every Italian cookbook I can find, feeling that my skills are increased each time I add a new volume to the shelf.

  The kitchen actually illustrates the difference in the way Carl and I propose to use the villa as compared with Dick and Julie. For them the villa served primarily as a pied-a-terre for quick stops—three days to two weeks—during the course of their travels around Europe. We, on the other hand, envision a European family home with frequent visits from our three children and friends.

  So the kitchen is my Project No. 1. Buying the villa itself was a stretch, but we've known all along that we would have to stretch a little farther and install a modern working kitchen to make the villa the livable home we want it to be. During the winter in Atlanta I begin by roving the aisles of Barnes & Noble. I finally settle on two books to help me focus on kitchen issues in general. I talk with friends who have redone their kitchens to get tips on any mistakes I should avoid, but this proves to be a blind alley: Either there were no mistakes, or my friends have simply learned to live with them and keep quiet. I never imagined there were so many magazines on kitchen design. I collect stacks of them. The cashier at our local pharmacy begins to point out new issues as soon as I walk through the door. I'm not surprised that there is no ready-made plan for an Italian Renaissance kitchen but, insofar as I can find, no one's ever attempted to put a modern kitchen and eating area of any sort into a large rectangular room with an eighteen-foot ceiling. Nonetheless, I begin to identify elements that appeal to me. Courtesy of Barnes & Noble again, I find a new kitchen book with cutouts of various appliances. Like a young girl with her first paper dolls, I punch out, stick down, pull up, shift around until, finally, Eccola! the perfect kitchen. At least I've settled on the main working elements.

  Back in Piombino Dese in the spring, things go badly before they go well. The obvious starting point is Mobilificio Roncato, a mammoth furniture outlet and factory west of town toward Loreg-gia. Giacomo introduces us to the proprietor, Remo Roncato. The retail outlet alone seems as big as the Georgia Dome, but broken into dozens of rooms, all rigged so that the lights turn on only when someone enters the area. Behind the retail building is a factory that manufactures furniture for sale to dealers throughout the Veneto and adjacent regions. Remo has a major business, and he and his wife Maria are there from morning to night, supervising every detail from the sale of a single chair to the largest wholesale transaction.

  Remo's success story is repeated over and over in the Veneto. His father was an artisan woodworker, specializing in marquetry finishes on handmade furniture. Remo joined his father in the trade, bringing the new drive and ambition—fueled by the poverty and hunger rampant in the Veneto in the early years after World War II—that seem to characterize his whole generation of Venetans. Today the single most prosperous province in all of Europe is not in Germany, as I have been conditioned to expect—it's the Veneto. But it would be hard for me to name as many as five companies that are really household names. The whole economic machine is built on thousands of commercial success stories like Remo's.

  Nonetheless, Remo strikes out on my kitchen. I start to learn that I am not going to find ready-made cabinets and counters for a kitchen twenty-three feet long and eighteen feet wide. Not only is Remo's stock designed for apartments and small houses, the pieces have no symmetry. I'm convinced that if we install something asymmetrical, Palladio's ghost will rise from his grave in Vicenza and find a new home at Villa Cornaro, stalking around the kitchen every night, rattling pots, and moaning like the wind in agony from the injury to his spirit.

  Of course, Remo manages to sell us two sofas before we leave his store. “The villa has over a hundred chairs,” Carl grumbles, “and not one of them is comfortable to sit in.”

  We visit two other kitchen stores, also in vain. Giacomo comes to our rescue. He suggests we talk with Renato Rizzi about something custom-made. Renato is the architect and interior designer from Mirano who designed Giacomo's Caffe Palladio. Naturally Carl's first reaction is that we can't afford it. After discussion (Carl's) and threats (mine) we have a meeting with Renato.

  “We can always say no to what he proposes,” I maintain.

  “I've already said no, but it didn't take,” Carl responds.

  Renato is somewhat awed to be working in Palladio's footsteps, but he is up to the task. Carl and I both like him immediately. He is a sticklike figure at least six foot four in height, with the air of an artist. Carl is relieved to see a calculator among his gear.

  “Whatever you do here must be very big,” Renato says wisely, looking around the room for the first time. He likes the clippings I show him, particularly photos for a freestanding island with a glass vitrine on the front, rising nearly four feet and screening behind it my working counters, sink, stove, microwave, and dishwasher.
Carl is mollified when Renato says we should retain the kitchen table that we already have, as well as the French armoire. To our even greater surprise, he says we should also retain the large terra-cotta hood. For a new light fixture, he joins us in a trip to the attic, where he inspects an old eight-armed ceramic chandelier that Dick Rush bought in Bassano and then found no use for. “Perfect!” Renato exclaims. In fact, we end up needing just three custom items in addition to the new appliances themselves: the vitrine-cum-screen, a sink and cooking counter to fit below the terra-cotta hood, and a giant freestanding cupboard-cabinet-refrigerator unit along the south wall. He sketches them quickly. They're beautiful! Moreover, they're symmetrical! Palladio's ghost can relax.

  “Use the calculator,” Carl suggests politely. He wants to hear numbers. Renato works with a firm that can build the custom pieces. Within a few days he's back with final drawings and a firm price quote. Carl has always told me that the way to arrive at the true cost of a project is to double the architect's estimate. He calls it his “Architect's Rule of 2.” So he's moderately surprised to hear that the quoted price from the builder is only 20 percent above the figure that he told Renato was our absolute maximum price. Then he becomes almost pleased when further bargaining reduces the quoted price by 10 percent. Renato promises that everything will be completely installed by September 1, in time for our fall return to Piombino Dese.

  Meanwhile, for the remainder of our spring visit, all I have to do is learn to cook scaloppine di vitello al marsala on a two-burner propane stove.

  “It's bigger than the Doge's Palace, Mom!”

  That's Jim's first impression of the villa. Jim is our youngest child, about to start his sophomore year in college. He has never seen Villa Cornaro, even though we have bedeviled him with photographs for the year we have owned it. On a scorching August morning he and I, newly arrived from the Treviso airport, are standing in Piazzetta Squizzato, across the street from the villa. The dry summer dust that clings to the storefronts along Via Roma might seem dreary elsewhere, but here in the Veneto I decide that it's a picturesque cinnamon drape.

  The new kitchen is to be installed in the coming week. Jim and I have flown over from Atlanta to witness the process and be sure that nothing goes terribly wrong. Carl and I at first feel uncertain whether the expense of a special trip is justified, even though I find a bargain plane ticket. The thought that Jim has never seen his parents’ folly tips the balance. Jim has ten days open between the end of his summer job and the start of his college year, so we manage to fit in a whirlwind trip.

  Giacomo has decided that a young man of college age might need a special incentive to return often to Piombino Dese. Late in the afternoon he arrives at the villa with two very pretty young women, one a short, blond, curly-haired high school student who speaks excellent English, the other taller, with dark auburn hair. They want to practice their English, Giacomo explains transparently. I think his true agenda is to have Jim fall madly in love with a Venetan girl. Jim, the most gregarious of our children, soon wanders over to Caffe Palladio with the girls to meet other young people. His high-school Spanish helps bridge the language gap and his new friend Betty translates what he doesn't understand. In the evening he, together with Giacomo's son Leonardo and others, is off to a disco. Jim feels at home in Piombino Dese as quickly as I did.

  The spirit of Palladio seems to put extra pressure on workers at the villa. There must be a sense of a historical obligation to give the villa their best. As the following week progresses, my kitchen unfolds and the parts fit together like an elegant puzzle.

  The enormous, symmetrical, freestanding wall cabinet is perfectly proportioned for the room; anything less would be swallowed by the space and anything more would overwhelm it. The color—matching the walnut of the French armoire that it faces—is perfect, too. The color of that cabinet was the only point on which Carl balked at what Renato proposed. Carl thought the blond pear-wood Renato suggested would look too modern. All the colors work well with the gray-black and coral tones of the granite coun-tertops we have chosen. Culinary heaven!

  In the afternoon Jim and I tootle around the countryside in our rental car. We inspect the Roman mosaic pavements in Treviso, Giotto's frescos at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Palladio's often-rebuilt bridge at Bassano. We pick our way along the hairpin turns of Monte Grappa in the first range of the Alps. Of course, we take the train into Venice and revisit the Basilica, the Doge's Palace, the Accademia (ack-ah-DEH-mee-ah). I begin to think of the treasure trove of Carpaccio's huge canvases there as old friends. We board a vaporetto (motorboat-bus) to Torcello, where Venice was first settled sixteen hundred years ago, and we bathe in the Venetian sunlight reflected off the Adriatic waters to the east and the Alps to the northwest. No one has ever bested John Ruskin (The Stones of Venice) in describing the distant and mysterious silhouette of Venice viewed from Torcello.

  Beyond the widening branches of the lagoon, and rising out of the bright lake in which they gather, there are a multitude of towers, dark, and scattered among square-set shapes of clustered palaces, a long and irregular line fretting the southern sky.

  Since we can't yet cook in our kitchen-in-progress, we have no choice but to sample restaurants of the region every evening. Carl will understand! So we're off to savor Venetan dishes at Da Barbesin, Due Mori, and Alia Torre in Castelfranco; Da Irene in Loreggia; Da Giovanni in Padua. But there's a danger in enjoying your food too much, I discover. I am so intensely devouring my fegato alia veneziana—calf's liver in the Venetian style, that is, with onions and parsley—outdoors at Alia Torre that I don't notice the meal that mosquitoes are making of my legs. When I crawl into bed that night, my legs look like swatches of dotted swiss.

  Jim's social life is expanding like the universe in the seconds following the big bang. With the kitchen now complete and our departure date on top of us, Jim begs to host a final dinner party at the villa for his new friends. My contribution is to cook two large pans of lasagne in my newly installed oven, toss a gigantic salad, and pick out dozens of dolci (sweets) from the pasticceria down the street. We set twelve places at the dining table. By 8:00 p.m. more than twenty friends have arrived. “You're an engineering student and you can't count?” I chide Jim, scrambling to find more plates. The young guests make quick work of all the lasagne, salad, bread, and dolci, and then move with equal speed through miscellaneous other things that I desperately turn up: pickles, olives, grissini (bread sticks), chocolates. There is lots of wine, also. Without exception the young people are friendly, well mannered, and garrulous. When the food has disappeared, they help clear the table and then wander amiably through the ground floor of the villa, admiring the frescos and architectural spaces. Finally they settle outdoors on the south portico to smoke (many of them) and talk. Jim seems to have no trouble with the language.

  Jim and I wash dishes late into the night. We get to bed after 2:00 a.m. and rise at 5:00 a.m. to catch our early flight. We sleep all the way back to Atlanta.

  I realize with a start that we are nearing our first anniversary of owning the villa. My mind fills with thoughts that I have pushed aside in the scurry and urgency of responding to everyday exigencies. I am reminded of the old bromide that we consume our lives with tasks of little importance but short deadlines, postponing more important matters that we convince ourselves can be done later.

  Whatever brought you to buy a Palladian villa?

  I am still hung up on that examination of the motives that brought me to my second life in Piombino Dese. Maybe my subconscious has been working on the problem while my conscious self has been focused on lawn mowers and kitchen appliances, because I have some new ideas now. I've gotten past the need to choose a single motivation from the grab bag of “second home” and “growth” and “escape” (and whatever else I might come up with). Now I can see that my motives are not static; all are true, just at different times and to different degrees.

  I had indeed been seeking a second home for all the trad
itional reasons that drive city dwellers to acquire one: novelty, change of pace, relaxation, and the like. Many of our Atlanta friends seem to have preceded us in acquiring second homes on Georgia lakes or in the North Carolina mountains; some have moved farther afield to the Atlantic or Gulf coast, the western ski slopes, even Maine. My own background (and Carl's pleasure with the area) made New Hampshire a reasonable alternative.

  But how much time would I have spent there in a year? One month, maybe six weeks? Probably something like that—certainly not four months. So why haven't I limited my Italian time to the same length? That, it seems, was a separate decision, but one that came so early and so easily that I never knew I was making it. Villa Cornaro is no New England lake home existing to serve my family during our holidays. Villa Cornaro is a force of nature, a vibrant personality in the lives of its owners, the farmers who till its fields, the students and researchers who study and measure its lines, the tourists excited by its spirit, the townspeople reassured by its constant presence.

  My plans changed because I discovered that Villa Cornaro needs me.

  15

  Showtime

  Since Wednesday, workers on the south steps of the villa have been banging away like frustrated drummers. They're building a huge temporary stage about four feet high overlooking the small park— about an acre—that we call our “backyard.” On Thursday hundreds of folding chairs with cloth seats and backs were delivered to the side gate and other workers are setting them in rows facing the stage. The result is remarkably neat, considering how uneven the surface of the lawn has become through the years.