Palladian Days (12 page)

“How will you cook those swordfish steaks?” I ask.
“Alia griglia?
On the grill?”

It's Saturday, market day in Piombino Dese. Carl and I stand at the fish counter—actually a Mercedes truck whose side panel is lifted to reveal a rolling fish market.

The genial, middle-aged stranger ahead of us orders enough swordfish for a family of fifty. He must know a lot about swordfish, I decide, and his friendly smile invites my question about cooking them. He immediately outlines for me not one but three recipes. I decide to try the top-of-the-stove one:

The gentleman doesn't stop with swordfish. Looking at the shipment of halibut fillets on display at the counter, he launches into a
ricetta straordinaria
—superb recipe—for them as well. He continues chattering about a rather complicated recipe for
coda di rospo
(tail of monkfish) while the fishmonger is preparing his order: a
dozen swordfish steaks, half a dozen large crayfish, a kilo of bright pink shrimp.

My culinary consultant introduces himself and pulls out his business card. He lives in Piombino Dese, but we haven't met before because he travels on business much of the time in southern Italy, he explains. “Puglia, Bari, Basilicata …”

“Ah, Basilicata,” I interject. “I've just begun reading Carlo Levi's
Cristo si e fermato a Eboli
. What a poor area!”

“Yes,” he agrees, “but so very beautiful, a magnificent wilderness in Italy.”

As he gathers his purchases to depart, I ask him if he is an amateur cook, since he's given me so many different recipes.

“Ah, no.” He smiles.
“Non sono un cuoco, sono un mangiatore!
I'm not a cook, I'm a big eater!”

Market day is a delightful anachronism.

Piombino Dese's market day was sanctioned by a government decree in 1790 and continues to recur every Saturday. Different towns have their markets on different days. Well before Silvana arrives to open the
balcone
on Saturday morning, a garden of tents sprouts on the piazza opposite the villa and on two piazzas in the next block. Bright awnings burst forth like exuberant petals: large green-and-white stripes, sun-bleached red-and-white thinner stripes, tiny blue-and-white checks, broad orange and white swaths. Stalls erupt with pale melons, fuzzy kiwis, dull-red apples, smooth green pears, tiny green beans, tomatoes long and thin or tiny and round, eggplants a gorgeous deep shiny purple-brown waiting to be broiled in very thin slices and topped with Parmesan to make me dream of heaven. Other stands overflow with huge hanging prosciutto hams, long rosy-gray bundles of salami, all shapes and types of cheeses, some round and fat and deep yellow, others fist-size and white, the
hufala
mozzarella in wet packets concealing their delicate-textured taste, destined to combine with sweet tomatoes and freshly picked basil as a dish for deities. One
movable feast of a truck roasts chickens and pork on the spot for immediate eating, enveloping the piazza in delectable aromas. Smiling Venetans vie for my business with waving arms.
“Molto buono! Molto fresco!”
they cry.

As I wander past the fish truck, a long black eel wriggles from a knot of eels squirming in a square basin set under running water. He flops over the lip of the basin and falls to the ground. Unnoticed at first, he slithers along the gutter like a convict who has gone over the wall at Alcatraz. Alas, just inches short of the drain grate that he has targeted as his escape hatch, he is apprehended by the burly fishmonger and dumped back in the basin.

Bras and panties hang from other booths; belts and shoes of all colors are spread for display. I buy two wonderful undershirts layered with cotton inside and wool outside, knowing the late autumn days of the Veneto can be savagely cold. Sheets and towels flutter like flags; there are tablecloths and kitchen tools, bolts of cloth, and huge boxes of threads—even sewing machines! Dresses, shirts, and trousers hang enticingly, handsome but often cheaply made and priced accordingly. A clever shopper can quickly assemble a new ensemble of sweater, skirt, and sandals, all from different stalls. Other vendors offer a hothouse of flowers and shrubs.

The food, the dry goods, the sewing machines—all these items are now available in local stores open every day of the week. Although some of the produce may be slightly fresher than what I buy at the Battistons’
supermercato
, much of it is not. Once, in unpacking my market purchases in the villa's kitchen, I find the tomatoes chilled from refrigeration, and the date on the container of tiny shrimp no more current than that on containers at the
supermercato
.

But the
supermercato
is all about efficiency: you enter, select, pay, leave. Missing is the grand social convocation of the weekly market, where 90 percent of the town's citizens spend several hours chatting, gossiping, parading, strutting. I am reminded of the occasional town meetings in my native New Hampshire, but the market
is weekly and without any agenda at all. The Piombinesi discuss their aunt's latest operation, their daughter's
fidanzato
, the cabinet members of the current government, the latest execution of a criminal in America,
burrata
mozzarella, a good recipe for swordfish. They are well dressed, well coiffed, happy to be alive—and especially happy to be living in Italy.

Market Day awnings fill Piazzetta Squizzato north of the villa

So the market days may continue for decades in the future, wholly without economic justification, redundant of more logical and less labor-intensive distribution systems. They exist as a social mechanism, for their charm and their tradition. For Americans, the market is an anachronism, something out of place and time. Our insistent search for the “next new thing” means we find the past irrelevant to our lives. For Italians, the market is not an anachronism. It is a warm, vital part of their lives, old-fashioned but loved for that very reason. The market connects them with their families, their fellow townspeople, and their past. The weekly ceremony brings rhythm, structure, and sense to their lives.

Perhaps the anachronism lies in America, in neighborhoods seeking to thrive without community and without the past.

In my conversations with Dick Rush, he seems to view Villa Cornaro as an object of art existing alone in space—free from its surroundings, from its history, from the families who built it and cherished it, maintained and changed it for almost half a millennium. Dick is an art expert, which neither Carl nor I will ever be, so that may account for the difference in our feeling about the villa. We decide right away that we will never understand the villa except as a home, lodged in its history and the people who surround it now and did so in its past.

We are on the road! In our pathetically cramped, hot, underpowered, and overpriced rental car (“This model should be called the Fiat Furnace,” Carl says), we're off to little towns with grand country palaces: to nearby Maser to see Villa Barbaro and to Fan-zolo for Villa Emo; then farther afield for Villa Foscari (known inexplicably as “La Malcontenta”) at Gambarare on the Brenta River near the lagoon of Venice; and, finally, Villa Almerico (“La Rotonda”) on the outskirts of Vicenza, Palladio's adopted hometown. We are trying to arrive at our own conception of where Villa Cornaro sits in this pantheon of Palladian icons. About eighteen Palladio-designed villas still stand in the Veneto, the number depending on how you count a few whose connection with Palladio is doubtful or where changes through the centuries are so great that little of Palladio is left. We decide that Barbaro, Emo, La Malcontenta, and La Rotonda, together with Cornaro, constitute a sort of “Big Five.” They are all large villas designed (except La Rotonda) for wealthy Venetian patrons; they were built substantially the way Palladio designed them; and they have not suffered fundamental changes since. So these are the ones we set off to see first. We are on the lookout for contrasts and similarities to our own villa.

Our plan almost drowns in a sea of frustration. We begin charging along the back roads of the Venetan countryside with brash assurance, soon slowing to confused bewilderment at the lack of signs on some roads and the cryptic markings on others. Finally we are reduced to the hesitant creep that is recognized worldwide as the desperate mark of the hopelessly lost. We avoid blaming each other for being lost only because there are so many other targets conveniently at hand. We begin with the roads themselves and move on to the maps we are using, the dearth of numbered routes, the Italian system of marking roads with signs that simply point randomly to nearby or distant cities (“They must teach geography in driving school,” Carl grumbles), and drivers who object noisily to our stopping in the middle of an intersection to compare the directional markers with the array of towns on our map. Gradually we derive some lessons. Most useful is the realization that a large sign pointing to the right and reading, for example, “Vicenza” does not mean that the next right turn takes you to Vicenza. Only a
tourist would have such a misconception, as we learned on one occasion when—Vicenza-bound—we found ourselves sitting in the midst of a rail yard surrounded by locomotives and tank cars. Such a sign actually means that somewhere in the next half mile, among the several roads to the right, is one leading to Vicenza.

Map of five major Palladian villas fanned across the Venetan plain west of Venice

“A
learning experience,” we assure each other, secretly happy to be in Italy on a sunny day with a pleasant mission and no fixed schedule for achieving it.

Slowly but inexorably we find all four of the villas we are seeking. The route to Villa Emo at Fanzolo seems especially circuitous, with left turns and right turns on narrow country lanes crisscrossing through miles of fields planted in corn, grain, potatoes, and beans. Only several years and a dozen visits later do we learn that there are at least two other easy, direct routes to Villa Emo. The fact that four of the five villas were built for the nobility of Venice itself—rather than for the provincial nobles of Vicenza who supported Palladio's early career—is not coincidental. (La Rotonda was built by a wealthy churchman of Vicenza, newly returned from Rome, not as a villa but as an entertainment palace in the suburban countryside.) The Venetians did not merely have bigger resources and bigger ambitions; they may have been more desperate as well. The Ottoman Turks were methodically cutting off all of Venice's contacts with the eastern Mediterranean, where the Venetian families had made their fortunes in trade and, in a few cases like the Cornaro family, in vast plantations. The Venetian families were trying to find a new harbor in which to anchor their fortunes. Plantations on the mainland—each centered on a villa—seemed like their best bet, especially because the countryside had been relatively peaceful for thirty-five years or more since Venice's disastrous War of the League of Cambrai and because of the discovery of corn in the New World. The yield from corn was six to seven times greater than the yields obtained from earlier grain crops such as millet. With so much of the families’ assets newly committed to the big new plantations on the mainland, the owners found it prudent to be present on site from the planting each spring through to
harvesttime, sometimes with a side trip to the Dolomites in midsummer. That process of coming out from Venice each spring and returning in the fall is what gave rise to the
villa
—country palace—phenomenon in the sixteenth century. The prosperous Venetians wanted something of the elegance of their Venetian palaces but with less expense.

Some of the prominent Venetian architects had tried their hand at it before Palladio. One of the earliest results was Villa Giustinian at Roncade, designed in the early 1500s by Pietro Lombardo, still in the Gothic spirit with a floor plan reminiscent of the palaces in Venice. Jacopo Sansovino, Venice's leading architect in the second quarter of the 1500s, weighed in with Villa Garzoni at Pontecasale, and Michele Sanmicheli designed the first Cornaro villa at Piom-bino, the one that bedeviled Palladio when he began designing our own Villa Cornaro twelve years later. In other words, as Palladio moved into the thirty-year period when he would create his Big Five, he was burdened by relatively few precedents. He did not have to displace some earlier, widely accepted style for villas in order to establish his own paradigm, the look and principles that became known as Palladianism.