Palladian Days (2 page)

In the spring of 1987 I decided that a well-ordered Atlanta family such as ours should have a second home in upstate New Hampshire or possibly Vermont. Although my mother was from Oklahoma and my father from Edinburgh, Scotland, I grew up in Littleton, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where my father was a doctor. Since Carl seemed to be weaning himself from working all seven days of the week, I felt the time was ripe for a country retreat, a place where we might, in Thoreau's phrase, “live deliberately.” Two of our children were in college and the youngest was in high school. I was cheerfully making full-time work of my part-time post as music director of a small church near our home in Atlanta, the result of returning to school for a master's degree in sacred music. Ashley, Carl, and Jim applauded their mother's return to academia and found her exam-time anxiety to be a special treat. Still, my plate was not filled; I determined that a vacation house would be a lodestone to draw the family together regularly and to retain familial—or at least friendly—ties through coming decades. Like our black labrador Cleo with a new rawhide bone, I seized the idea and began gnawing away at it.

Visions sprouted in my head: a two-story clapboard cottage on Sugar Hill, or a stone house along the banks of the Gale River, its entranceway a spiderweb of climbing yellow roses. The dreams were vivid in color, scent, and sound, and particular to my native White Mountains.

A ream of National Geodetic Survey maps of northern New
Hampshire, each tightly rolled and secured with a rubber band, stood like a bouquet in a corner of our Atlanta bedroom. I'd accumulated the maps through the past ten years and, on visits to my parents, had driven over most of the roads depicted with little squiggly lines. I was often accompanied by my aging garrulous Scottish father, whose legendary love of the mountains and streams of the region translated into exhilarating storytelling with all who chose to listen and some who didn't. Perhaps we'd find just the home I'd pictured along Skookumchuck Brook running down the north slope of Cannon Mountain, or maybe a perfect bungalow on the narrow ribbon of back road twisting from Littleton to Franconia, where the Presidential Range rests like a purple velvet blanket tossed across the horizon. Or we might spot a cottage on Skinny Ridge Road west of Littleton, where high silver pastures fall away to the midnight blue mirror of Littleton Lake placidly reflecting Mount Misery.

I convinced myself that New Hampshire is easily accessible from Atlanta. A two-and-a-half-hour flight to Boston, a quick stop at the car rental counter, and then—with me driving instead of pokey Carl—just two more hours to our country retreat. Carl was noncommittal when I floated the idea—which I took to mean yes. All that remained was for me to find at a bargain price the spot that I had conjured in my mind.

That is my reason one Sunday afternoon in late April 1987, as I sit in our Atlanta living room surrounded by a sea of Brobdingnag-ian newspapers, for pulling out the Sunday magazine of the
New York Times
. Rather than launch immediately into the crossword puzzle, I begin to thumb the pages where ads appear for grand houses on Long Island and penthouses in Manhattan, and occasionally for summer houses in New England. I have chosen a bad week for New England summer homes, however; not a single one is listed. In the midst of my disappointment, my eye stops at an unusually unattractive ad from a Greenwich, Connecticut, realtor for a villa in the Veneto region of Italy, a villa allegedly designed by Andrea Palladio, the most influential figure in the history of western architecture.

Frankly, the whole thing seems implausible, but an interesting coincidence nonetheless. The coincidence lies in the fact that Carl and I had made plans several months earlier for a July visit to the Palladian villas in the Veneto. Our friends from London, Judith and Harold, are to meet us there.

With a “Ha!” I show the ad to Carl and tell him that if I don't find the right spot in New England, we can always settle for our own Palladian villa.

Carl reacts with a disturbing amount of interest. He pulls from our bookshelves the copy of Michelangelo Muraro's
Venetian Villas
that we purchased several years earlier, following a three-week family vacation in Florence with a quick side trip to Venice. There is Villa Cornaro staring back at us in full color. Villa Cornaro, we discover, is not just a Palladian villa; of the eighteen surviving villas designed by Palladio, it is one of the five largest, best preserved, and most influential in later architecture.

“But, Sally, it's enormous!” Judith complains two months later after the four of us have climbed from our small, un-air-conditioned rental car parked in Piazzetta Squizzato to stare, dumbstruck at first, across the street at Villa Cornaro. The villa looms above the ancient wall that surrounds it and above Via Roma as well, placid and mysterious as the Sphinx, completely detached from the petty bustle of Piombino Dese on a scorching July day.

“Enormous,” Judith repeats, to emphasize her point. “Beautiful, yes, but very,
very
big.” Her Israeli accent flavors her words and adds to their authority.

“Mammoth, Carl! You'd need roller skates to get from one end to the other!” Harold's grin suggests that he would be happy to don the skates.

It's a palace, I say to myself. Carl keeps his thoughts to himself also.

The gate to the villa is ajar, so we enter to see an elderly couple awaiting us on the north portico. Epifanio Marulli, a gray-haired gentleman with surprisingly bright blue eyes, was custodian of the
villa long before Dick Rush, the current owner, arrived on the scene eighteen years earlier, and he has remained as Dick's custodian as well. Epifanio's wife, Elena, is with him. From a distance they are dwarfed by the thick, twenty-one-foot-tall Ionic columns rising to support the thinner Corinthian columns of the floor above. They smile shyly, no doubt wondering, as I am, how they will communicate with these strangers who speak no Italian. Harold confided earlier in the morning that he has a little “tourist Italian,” as he calls it, left from vacations his family took when he was a teenager, but Carl and I have taken little comfort in it. “That should be very helpful,” Carl kidded him, “as long as you don't get confused and ask the custodian for a gondola ride or an antipasto by mistake.”

Carl and Sally at the gate of Villa Cornaro

In fact, Harold has been modest once again, as is his nature. He quickly establishes halting but serviceable communications with the Marullis, to everyone's relief.

Our ascent up the villa's gradual steps brings us to a fourteen-foot-deep porch, which in turn leads us to gigantic old wooden doors and then an entrance hall. To our left and right stretch long rooms clad in giant frescos, all glowing in the bright noon sun. Ahead lies the grand salon, an enormous white cube lighted by a wall of windows facing south. The ceiling is held aloft by four massive Ionic columns solemnly observed by six elegant, larger-than-life statues of Venetian figures set into niches around the room.

My first and overwhelming impression is the immensity of the spaces—not just the floor space of the rooms, but their volume, the vast space over our heads before the ceiling caps us more than twenty-four feet above the floor in the central
salone
and almost as high elsewhere. This, I think, is not a place where mortals live. I
begin to feel disoriented, to feel that I have lost track of which room I have left or which I have entered. I should have trailed a string behind me, like Theseus in the Labyrinth, so that I will know my way out and can tell whether I have been in a certain room before.

The grand salon—lower
piano nobile

The windows of the villa have a height and width to match the scale of the rooms. As a result, the rooms are awash with noonday light spilling in from all sides. From the south the sun bakes the terrazzo of the upstairs floor to a warmth that I can feel through the thin soles of my sandals. Antique furniture on a modest scale is placed sparingly but attractively throughout the villa—large marble tables, painted
armadi
, handsome but uninviting chairs, and one beautiful wrought-iron bed so perfect as to date and place that it could have been something that Giorgio Cornaro himself brought when he and his new bride, Elena, took possession of the villa in 1554.

Carl tells me later that for him the strongest impression came from the pastel and earth tones of the 104 frescos that blanket the walls of all the principal rooms except the central
salone
itself. Stucco frames enclose the frescos, and lively stucco putti—angelic cherubs—cluster in three dimensions above the tall doorways. The original terra-cotta and terrazzo floors that cover most of the villa extend beneath our feet the warm tones of the frescos.

Up great looping brick stairs, down tight twisted wooden ones, we stream along in the Marullis’ wake. We ooh and ah reflexively at everything, mesmerized. Carl and I simply fall in love with Villa Cornaro.
Ci siamo innamorati della villa
.

Amore
is one thing; buying a Palladian villa is another. Buying a Palladian villa is serious business under any circumstances, but especially for people with distinctly circumscribed resources such
as ours. Fortunately, Carl has good experience for the task. He began his career with twenty years as a lawyer in private practice; international business was one of his specialties. Now that he has moved into the business world himself, a smaller but significant part of his work is still overseas.

We begin by flying to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with the owners, Dick and Julie Rush, and their real estate agent from Greenwich, Connecticut. The Rushes reside in Greenwich but spend time regularly in Washington, where they lived previously. We have two objectives: One is to know the couple with whom we are dealing and to let them know us, and the other is to learn more about the realities of everyday life as expatriate property owners in the Veneto. The first objective is quickly achieved. Dick, a tall, slim gentleman, and Julie, his attractive and talkative wife, are charming, yet clearly apprehensive about who might buy the villa in which they have invested eighteen years of difficult restoration.

Their genuine love for Villa Cornaro is patent. Why are they selling it? we soon ask. Because Dick, at seventy-two—ten or so years older than Julie—is trying to simplify his estate and make it easier for Julie to administer as he becomes less active. Carl and I also quickly perceive that we are way out of our league financially. One indicator: By way of illustrating his efforts to simplify his estate, Dick points out that he will soon be auctioning one of his paintings, a
Magdalene
by Titian, in a forthcoming Sotheby's sale.

Dick and Julie assure us about everything relating to villa life, although some of the assurances are less calming than they imagine. The currency-control laws that limit the ability to repatriate money invested in Italy may not apply to the sale of a villa, but in any event Italy is expected to remove the restriction within the next few years. The Red Guard is now a thing of the past in Italy; Dick has even dropped the kidnap insurance that he once carried.

“Kidnappers?” I interject.

“Don't worry about that, Sally,” Carl responds. “We'll just post our balance sheet on the front gate, and they won't come near us.” Dick Rush is even less amused than I am.

With only a brief pause Dick continues his list of dubious assurances. Upon closing and recording the sale of a historic structure such as the villa, he explains, there begins a sixty-day period in which the Italian government can elect to purchase the property at the same price that the buyer has paid, but the government never has any funds budgeted for this purpose, so it's not a worry.

Finally, Dick has concluded that Carl's legal background is perfect for dealing with the local authorities of Piombino Dese in case a problem “like the last one” arises in the future. Now, some might dwell on the implied compliment in Dick's remark, but Carl springs to the question that is on my lips as well: “What was the last problem?”