Palladian Days (20 page)

Fortunately the new china brings lots of compliments at dinner parties. I need the memory of those to help me through the hand washing that each piece requires after our guests have gone home.

Sitting on the south portico as the evening sun draws the last light of the day with it over the western horizon, I see a quick shadow dart from the gray sky, skim overhead, and light in the darkened corner of a high ledge. Ilario has filled those ledges with two rows of upturned nails in order to confound pigeons. A pair of
rondini
— swallows—are blithely constructing a nest there of twigs, leaves, and grass, undaunted by the tight squeeze between nails. I should be annoyed that they have evaded our avian defenses, but I choose simply to see them as a gentle metaphor for our own happy nesting.

Elena Contarini was sixteen years old when she arrived at Villa Cornaro as a bride in the spring of 1554, ready to create her own home here. Her arrival at her new villa would have come at the end of a long day, beginning with a slow boat rowed across the lagoon from the Cornaro palace on the Grand Canal to the shore at Mestre and ending with a jouncy twenty-mile carriage ride or a barge ride. What would her reaction have been upon first seeing the huge villa, like none ever built before?

Perhaps she would have entered through the dramatic double projecting portico on the north, moving timorously through the looming wooden portal and into the enormous grand salon, its walls glistening in white. The color of the room would spring from the rich patterned
mattoni
(brick tiles) underfoot. Her new husband, at her side, might explain the purpose of the six eight-foot-tall niches spaced around the walls, imposing in the late afternoon shadows even though not yet filled. The estate manager and household servants would be waiting to greet her before she began her first tour of the fourteen-thousand-square-foot country house.

The Villa Cornaro that she saw differed in some ways from the one that awaited me when Carl first carried me across the threshold. Elena would have been greeted by crackling fires in the
caminetti
(fireplaces) in every room, warming the air and casting flickering light about the rooms to replace the last rays of the sun. In my time, of course, all the chimneys are sealed, and have been since the villa's kindergarten years. Carl is happy with that.

“I'm not about to strike a match around here,” he says.

We would also worry about smoke billowing into the rooms and fogging the frescos each time some pigeon stuffs the flue with a new nest. The frescos came after Elena's time, however; she would
have found the walls decorated in tapestries and oil paintings brought from the Cornaro palace in Venice.

Today, beautiful eighteenth-century parquet doors close off each room, but Elena would have found the interior doorways closed by
portiere
, decorative textiles hung from a bar suspended between two upturned iron hooks. Elena would be aghast at our furniture; the villa is tremendously overfurnished by her sixteenth-century standards, which found two chairs enough for a well-furnished room. Nor would she sympathize with my view that a residence should generally be peaceful and quiet. She would expect the villa to serve as both a residence and a commercial workplace, like the palazzi in Venice. The first
piano nobile
would be an anthill of activity. Farmworkers would be trooping about, settling accounts in the grand salon, carrying sacks of grain on their backs up the brick stairs to the attic for drying, loading grapes in season into the
can-tina
for wine making. One end of the
cantina
might have housed the villa's kitchen, a floor beneath our present one. Elena, had she peered beyond, would have found the rest of the
cantina
filled with giant wine casks.

Elena's principal domain would be on the second
piano nobile
above, where she had her own bedroom and adjoining sitting room across the
andito
(hallway) from her husband's identical suite. From the south portico upstairs she could look over cultivated and carefully demarcated
campi
(farm fields) as far as she could see, some of them chocolate brown from recent plowing, others not yet tilled and still covered in green-brown stubble left from last year's harvest. One of them was the very same
campo
that Ilario farms today. She would find small
carpini
(hornbeams), recently planted, leading southward in rows to mark the east and west boundaries of the narrow but deep tract on which the mansion has been built— probably the same trees cut and sold for lumber by Tito Vianello in 1950. An
orto
lay to the west, producing fruit and vegetables for the Cornaros, their guests, and their household staff; now it is the site of the
comune's
civic playground.

• • •

If Elena was a reflective person, perhaps she realized, even at her young age, what a rare and exotic—though highly circumscribed— life she lived. Marriage was a rarefied state for wealthy sixteenth-century Venetians, men or women. The reason is a dramatic example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Unlike the English system of primogeniture, in which the oldest son was the principal heir of his parents, Venetian practice provided for “partible inheritance.” All legitimate sons inherited the patrimony equally; daughters who married also participated, by way of their dowries (which would usually pass in turn to their children and into the family line of their husbands).

Wealthy Venetian families perceived, however, that this rule— fair and equitable on its face—would splinter even a great fortune into many minuscule ones, leaving dozens of great-grandchildren without sufficient capital to support their patrician pretensions. To avoid this result, prudent Venetians simply limited the number of their descendants. In the fifteenth century, less than two-thirds of Venetian patricians were permitted by their families to marry. In most cases, unmarried adult women did not remain at home; they spent their lives in convents. Convents required a payment from the families of novitiates, but the requirement was far less than a dowry. The convent of San Zaccaria in Venice was famous for its beautiful nuns and fabulous nights of debauchery, confirmation that it was often estate planning—not religious commitment— that led young women to become brides of Christ.

Another consequence of partible inheritance and the resulting strictures on marriage could be the sudden extinction of a famous old family name as a result of unforeseen deaths in war or by disease. The leading branch of the Giustinian family, one of Venice's most prominent, found itself in the late twelfth century without any males of an age to father children, except one son who had become a monk in the monastery of San Nicolo di Lido. The family
appealed to the pope to release the monk from his vows. The son left the monastery, married the doge's daughter, and fathered six children. He then returned to the monastery, leaving his wife to rear the children. Her duties fulfilled, she entered a convent herself.

The union of Elena Contarini and Giorgio Cornaro would have been arranged by their wealthy, politically powerful families, although Giorgio probably had more direct involvement because his father was deceased. Elena, at age sixteen, had attained the average age of a Venetian bride. Giorgio, almost thirty-seven, was seven years older than the average groom. Elena would have brought with her a sizable dowry, which she would control to some degree throughout her married life.

Sometimes I wander through the villa imagining her thoughts on that first visit. Try as I may, however, I cannot project myself into her psyche. How different our lives were at age sixteen. I was a junior in boarding school, focused on exams and Saturday-night dates; she was married to a man closer in age to her father than to herself and was ensconced as the lady of a grand country estate. Did she consider herself a pawn in a cold dynastic game? Or did she relish her position and look to the future with excitement? The nuances of her world are unimaginable to me.

The couple's first son, Girolamo, named after Giorgio's father, was not born until eight years after their marriage; young Girolamo was just nine years old when Giorgio was killed at Lepanto. Girolamo's birth was followed quickly by that of a second son, Marco, who died at age eighteen. The couple's older daughter married at age sixteen with a vast dowry of eighteen thousand ducats; the second daughter became abbess of the convent of San Martino on Murano, a position that presumably reflected a financial payment. After her husband's death, Elena remained in possession of the villa at Piombino until her remarriage in 1588 to Alberto Badoer, a prominent diplomat whose family had produced seven doges of Venice.

The No. l vaporetto—the boat-bus that wends its slowpoke way the whole length of the Grand Canal from the grim parking decks of Piazzale Roma to the fairyland of Piazza di San Marco—is like the little girl in the nursery rhyme: When it is good, it is very, very good; when it is bad, it's horrid.

On a steamy hot afternoon in late August, as I stand inside the cabin surrounded by a few inscrutable Venetians who must be here by mistake and by hordes of sweltering, confused, and irritable tourists, all packed tighter than matches in a new matchbook, the No. l seems like a slow ride to hell. Amid mild curiosity as to whether a furtive hand may be in my purse, now hidden from view by the knapsack that a husky northern European youth has thrust in my face, genuine concern as to whether the boat has already passed my stop, and preliminary planning as to how I will eventually force my way through the wall of fellow passengers to disembark, my greatest concern is that all these tourists are getting the wrong impression of Venice. I want to shout, “Venice isn't like this! Come back later, around seven this evening!” Of course, I would need about fifteen languages to communicate with everyone on board, so I stand silent, gathering my energy for the campaign to reach the gangway when the boat finally bangs against the floating dock at my destination.
“Vermesse, permesso,”
I mumble as I plow toward the steps, on the chance that I will be mistaken for a Venetian.

I look back at the vaporetto as it lurches away from the dock, like an awkward elephant threading its way through the clutter of gondolas,
traghetti
(ferries), water taxis, garbage boats, motorized delivery barges, and pleasure craft that scramble around it. Perhaps some of the passengers will be courageous or foolhardy enough to board again this evening, I think to myself. They should begin with a prosecco outdoors at a
caffe
on the Dorsoduro near the basilica of
Santa Maria della Salute, so they can look back across the basin of the Grand Canal toward all the storied emblems of Venice: the Basilica di San Marco and its campanile, the Palazzo Ducale, Palla-dio's church of San Giorgio Maggiore. The sun will sag low in the west and all the heat and chaos of the day will be dissipating. The western sky will effloresce into an infinite spectrum of reds and golds, and its reflection will stir to the surface the warm colors that the hot summer sun has chased deep into the stone and masonry of all the palaces and churches that line the Grand Canal. The commercial traffic will have abandoned the canal to the languid passage of the vaporetti and gondolas. As the sun touches the horizon, transforming Venice into a muted silhouette, they should leave their
caffe
and board the No. 1 vaporetto afresh, heading this time up the canal toward the train station and Piazzale Roma. There will be plenty of seats, but the best choice is to walk through the cabin and out the swinging doors onto the tiny stern deck. With luck, some of the four seats there will be empty and their view of the canal will be unobstructed.

Carl and I take this voyage one evening. I feel like Cleopatra inspecting the Nile shore from her pleasure barge. The proud palaces and churches of the Grand Canal glow in the pre-twilight, the flutter and lapping of the water modulating the light in ways too subtle for the conscious eye to discern but bringing the facades to dance like the dark surface that shimmers below.

In the pattern we establish of catching an early train into Venice several mornings a week, Carl and I are content at first to view the palaces of the Grand Canal as a single object, a panorama of buildings knit into one resplendent fantasy. We recognize a few individual buildings—the immense Ca’ Cornaro della Ca’ Grande in San Maurizio parish, for example, or the stubby, unfinished Ca’ Venier dei Leoni, which lies across from it and now houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Soon, however, we want to learn more about the particular palaces that were owned by the Cornaro family. We begin to pore over the index of every book on Venetian
architecture that we can find. Ultimately, we are able to track down ten palaces on the Grand Canal that the Cornaros either built or owned at some point in their history. Over time, the exercise allows us to begin viewing the monuments along the canal individually instead of collectively, and to place them at their own separate points in time, which gives us a better appreciation of their stylistic evolution. The process also leads us to understand better our own villa and members of the Cornaro family who were important to its history.

One of the Cornaro palaces, Ca’ Cornaro-Piscopia, is one of the earliest Venetian palaces still standing. Built in the early 1200s in San Luca parish near the Rialto Bridge, it serves today (together with an adjacent palace) as the
municipio
of Venice. One morning we cross the Rialto Bridge and find a spot on the opposite side of the canal that allows us to view the palace straight on. The first two floors of the facade have the tall, narrow arches that characterize the Veneto-Byzantine style, but the two bland upper floors were added in the sixteenth century. To re-create the look of the original palace, Carl scans a picture of it into his computer, then deletes the upper two floors and drops the roof down onto the two original floors below. The result is a stunning, balanced, and remarkably symmetrical facade comparable in splendor, though not in size, to the Palazzo Ducale itself—a building that must have been as admired when it was built eight hundred years ago as it is today.