Palladian Days (23 page)

We hope there is time to show our guests still another Villa Cornaro at Romano d'ezzelino, a small town in the shadow of Bas-sano del Grappa that is rapidly becoming a busy suburb of that hilltop city. Alas, we have dallied too long at the Shoe Museum. The villa at Romano d'ezzelino, now home to a private school, is closed for the afternoon
riposo
. We peer through the gate at the reworked facade of the sixteenth-century villa. Carl reads aloud to us from our guidebook, telling us of the Orangerie that was added to the earlier structure under the supervision of Palladio's follower Vin-cenzo Scamozzi—the same man who designed the
barchessa
of our villa.

All is not lost. About three hundred yards along the road is an
enoteca
selling locally produced wine with an attractive Villa Cornaro label. Christoph is delighted; he begins calculating how many bottles he must buy for relatives back in Vienna. Carl and I buy several bottles ourselves and drink one that night after Christoph and Gail depart. We are reminded once again that a good label does not ensure a good wine. I wonder what the Vienna Cornaros will think.

A collateral benefit of having interesting houseguests is that they often reciprocate your invitation. That is how we end up the following year as houseguests of the Austrian ambassador to the Vatican.

Gail spies us in the crowd when we arrive by train at Rome's Termini Station. She expertly wends her way through the throng with us in tow. Car and driver await us at the curb. We enter the car's cool sanctuary with a conviction that we are traveling in a style far above our heads.

Now it is Christoph's turn to be tour guide. Needless to say, the sights he has arranged for us to see outshine the two villas (one of
them closed) and Shoe Museum that we organized for the Cornaros in the Veneto. The highlight is an expedition to the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Christoph rather than a chauffeur is at the wheel, but this is no Fiat Furnace. We settle back in air-conditioned comfort. Our objective: the church's Cornaro Chapel, commissioned in 1647 by one of the Cornaro family's cardinals and designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The central figure,
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
, depicting an angel poised to thrust a golden arrow into Saint Teresa's heart, is often described as Bernini's greatest sculpture and is sometimes cited as the greatest sculpture of the seventeenth century. Saint Teresa described her mystic experience:

One problem: The Cornaro Chapel is closed for a lengthy restoration project. The tall chapel is completely enclosed by scaffolds, which are themselves encased in opaque plastic sheets. This presents no obstacle for Christoph, who has arranged for the chief restorer to be present in person to give us a guided tour of the entire chapel and an explanation of the restoration project. Just in case we have questions beyond the scope of the chief restorer,
Christoph has also arranged for a representative of the Soprinten-dente di Belle Arti to be on hand as well.

The chief restorer leads us behind the plastic curtains and up a narrow metal stair to the first deck of scaffolding. We pause only for a brief glance at the skirts of Saint Teresa before moving up a second stair. On the next level we first see several workers dabbing at the decorative plaster molding that lines the chapel. They are cautiously removing centuries of grease and grime one square centimeter at a time. Our eyes are then drawn to the luminous glow of Saint Teresa's agonized face rising above the scaffold deck. No one could call it stone; it's nothing but the warmest, most delicate breathing skin. The pain and rapture of her face are not reduced by standing just eighteen inches away instead of peering up from the floor of the chapel two levels below. Bernini has left for posterity an amazing statement of his insight into religion, ecstasy, women, the human body, and stone itself.

To my left, the angel is poised like a pagan Cupid, his arm drawn back to thrust the golden arrow into Saint Teresa's heart. But now the angel's hand is empty. I turn to the chief restorer to say, jokingly, “The arrow's missing! I hope you have it under lock and key.” The chief restorer chuckles with me, but a few minutes later I notice that he is no longer in our small group. Have I hurt his feelings? I wonder. We are continuing our admiring inspection when I hear a rapid pounding as someone hurriedly mounts the metal stairs. The chief restorer pops into view and extends his hand toward me. I suddenly realize that what he is holding casually before me is a golden arrow.

“That's the original arrow, isn't it?” I ask reverently.

“Take it, take it,” he replies.

“Bernini's original arrow?” I ask again. Stunned to see one of the great icons of western art held before me, I am unable to move my hands from my sides.

“Original, yes, take it,” he says again.

“He really wants you to hold it, Sally,” Carl speaks up from over my shoulder, finally overcoming my paralysis. I reach out, as cautiously
as I would reach for a snowflake, and take the arrow in two hands. Suddenly I'm afraid that any motion I make may somehow damage the arrow. I envision my name recorded in history beside that of the man who burned the library at Alexandria. Nonetheless, I manage to turn slowly and show it to Carl. I notice that he makes no effort to reach out and hold it himself. Gail and Christoph crowd in to peer at it as well. I'm relieved to return it to the chief restorer, but my hands tingle for hours at the thought of what they held.

Soon we make our way down. As we reach the ground I see skeletons traced in intaglio on the floor of the chapel, leering up at me. I hope I have not offended them.

Carl's “sabbatical” comes to an end after twenty months—”My time outside the walls,” he calls it—and he returns to the full-time workforce. Once again I'm by myself in Piombino Dese for long stays each spring and fall, although Carl has now arranged to stretch his visits to one month each season. Carl, of course, points out that he is equally by himself in Atlanta.
Note to diary: Why are men so technical?

In the solitude of the villa, loneliness creeps in some evenings, arriving stealthily like the barely perceptible onset of a cold—first a scratchy throat, then a sniffly nose. My mornings disappear in dialogues with workmen, townspeople, Silvana, Bianca, Ilario, and Francesca. The hours of
riposo
are my own, however; only an American would call me between one and three-thirty in the afternoon. Community returns in late afternoons and early evenings, when I shop, visit nearby towns, or prepare tea on the back porch for friends. Nine o'clock signals Giacomo's arrival to close the villa. The clanking of metal bars and rapid clopping on terra-cotta tiles
diminish to a faint rhythm as he works his way through the west wing, the east wing, upstairs. Finally with a shouted
“Buona notte, signora Sally!”
he tugs the front door shut, shoots the heavy bolt with four
chings
of the huge key, and is gone. I am left in silence.

Television is not a feasible entertainment choice for me in Italy. The Rushes have left behind an old black-and-white TV, but I can extract nothing but grade-C western movies imported from the States, plus
Colpo grosso. Colpo grosso
is a sophomoric evocation of the wonders of the unadorned female form; our London friend Judith aptly named it “Boobs and Bums.” Lola Butler has instructed me to watch as much Italian TV as I can bear because, she says, it will accustom me to the rapid patter of Italian speech. But even the news programs are rough slogging. The female announcers are usually sultry sirens with long blond hair and enormous lips; they speak so rapidly you think you're listening to a tobacco auctioneer. Male emcees, by contrast, are older than Adam, wear wigs, and speak so slowly you want to wind them up.

So, after Giacomo leaves, I linger in the kitchen. I've made it my audio center. On the simple CD player that Carl brought over for me, I insert one after another of the CDs I've brought from Atlanta—late Beethoven string quartets, Mozart string quintets, the Lord Nelson Mass,
II Trovatore, Samson and Delilah
. I start lists of other CDs I need in Italy. My Mac PowerBook records it all. Mostly, though, I write letter after letter to children and friends, describing the villa, Piombino Dese, new friends, recipes, Italian politics.

The older I get, the more I remind myself of my father, from whom I take so many of my habits, some good and some outrageous. My father wrote volumes of letters to his three daughters after we each left home for boarding school at about age thirteen. Was it because he missed us? Was solitude driving him, despite my mother's presence? Were his letters notes for later memoirs? Was he trying to explain himself? Here I am writing letters as furiously as he did, without understanding what has led either of us to do it.

Some evenings I just climb into the “matrimonial bed”—so called by the Italians because its twin frames, springs, and mattresses are topped by a single set of linens—and read into the night. This quickly proves too luxurious and self-indulgent for my New England psyche. I decide that while in Italy I must read books only in Italian and only by Italian authors.

Riccardo brings me three of his Italian workbooks from school and a copy of Natalia Ginzburg's
Lessico famigliare (Family Dictionary)
. This is the book I devour first and love most. Ginzburg's docile mother and irascible father remind me of my own parents, and I am pulled into her Milanese world of the 1920s and 1930s. Her clear, direct, image-filled prose is easy for me to read; her astute observations on human nature are food for my evenings and, sometimes, afternoons alone. (Reading in Italian makes afternoon reading acceptable.) In the small local bookstore I find a volume of Ginzburg's essays and read about her three years in Britain with her husband, a Jew from Turin. He taught at the university there while she cared for their three children and studied the inscrutable British character. She writes—so briefly!—of her husband's death in 1943 at the hands of the Nazis and of her subsequent struggle to establish herself as a writer in Rome so that she could support the children. I weep when I read her brief summary of those few years of marriage.

My lists of Italian words pop up
dappertutto:
on the flyleaves of books, inside kitchen cupboards, on the mirror of my vanity upstairs.
“Il fratellastro.”
What was I reading when I jotted down the word for stepbrother or half-brother? Or
“il monello”
or
“zufolare”
or
“il citrullo”!
Maybe it was Primo Levi's
Favole (Fables)
, or perhaps short stories by Dino Buzzati.

Buzzati becomes my second-favorite Italian author after I read his short story “L'assalto al grande convoglio” (“Attack on the Great Convoy”). The protagonist, Gaspare Planetta, an old bandit newly released from jail, dreams of his past conquests while enduring the decline of his health and vigor. With a young protege he plans one final glorious assault on a convoy carrying gold. Plan-etta's strategizing brings me back to my father in the late years of his life, dreaming of one last, great stock-market bonanza to recoup all the tuition bills of his daughters; his grandest play netted five thousand dollars. Or one last big win at the racetrack, where he once won a thousand dollars on the daily double by betting on the numbers 3 and 8, the last two digits of my zip code as a college student. The story and its attendant clouds of memories open gates of sadness and regret.

Many of Buzzati's characters, such as Giuseppe Corte in “Sette piani” (“Seven Floors”), become permanent residents in my memory. Corte moves into a retirement home, where he and the other most able patrons live on the seventh floor. For various reasons other than personal choice, he is moved to lower and lower floors until at last he resides on the ground floor: a brilliant and chilling parable of old age. My own father, I muse, now in strong health but with wandering mind at age ninety-two, has already descended to the fourth floor, or perhaps the third.

As I accustom myself to the rhythm of these evenings alone and consider my options of reading or writing, or simply listening and pondering, I begin to sense a bright lightness of heart when I hear those last clicks of the lock as Giacomo departs. A melody forms in my mind, and before I can place the CD in the player I'm dancing around the kitchen to the scherzo in Dvorak's Seventh Symphony. My first week's sniffles of loneliness transform to a sense of blissful luxury. Never have I had such large, malleable blocks of free
time. Always there have been others to cook for, wash for, plan for, carpool for, select music for, meet or consult with. Suddenly I'm alone, and I find that solitude has its own satisfactions.

Our son Carl and his girlfriend Lisa fly through the west sitting room on the second floor. Lisa's caramel-colored hair sails behind her like a wedding veil. Carl is our middle child, the artist among us, who drew a recognizable mouse with whiskers when he was two years old. Lisa is the most sensible and focused twenty-year-old I know; in two months she will enter her final year in college, having survived on scholarships, student loans, and two simultaneous part-time jobs. Now she's applying to law school.