Palladian Days (25 page)

At this moment Giacomo walks around the corner of the villa and shouts up to us. “Signori, do you see that black bag hanging from the low branch over the bridge?”

We peer at the distant branch. It is almost touching the bridge, bowed down by some mysterious weight.

“ Api,”
says Giacomo.
“Tante api
. Many bees.” We hop up and follow Giacomo to see the marvel at close range.

We deduce that a queen bee, along with twenty-five thousand close friends, has fled her hive and set up housekeeping at our bridge. The bees seethe about in a massive black ball clinging to the limb.

“What should we do, Giacomo?”

“Ah, conosco una persona ehe…”
Giacomo knows exactly whom to call to come and remove them.

Giacomo's friend arrives the following evening, wearing a natty
cap and nonchalantly carrying a shoebox-shaped wooden box on his shoulder. The bees are still there. He pulls the bee-laden limb to the ground and clips it off, leaving the ball of bees humming on the grass. He sets his box beside them and opens a small door in its side. He lights a smoky torch and, with a bellows, gently blows smoke at the ball of bees. Gradually, so slowly their movement is almost imperceptible, the mass of bees begins to shift and flow into the small opening of the box. When all the bees have passed from sight, he snaps the door shut and departs. It seems magical.

The following spring he brings us a jar of delectable amber honey in appreciation for the hive of bees.

Two years later we arrive at the villa in early May to find another errant swarm has set up housekeeping in our stairwell, off the southwest brick staircase. The bees have built a beautifully intricate honeycomb between the interior glass window and the
balcone
beyond. We marvel at thousands of bees constructing a vast apartment complex, but we realize they must go, for the health of the villa.

Again the bee-man arrives with the same snappy cap and conjures the bees into his box. This time he doesn't bring us any honey.

Over time we find other ways to tweak the villa for improved functionality. For example, each of the four main doors onto the two large brick stairs is locked by a different key, and the locks cannot be opened from within the stairwell. As a result, we can't lead guests up the large brick stairs—which are much grander than the tight wooden stairs—without one of us first dashing up the wooden stairs in order to unlock the door at the top. After much delay we find a locksmith to install new locks that work with a single key from either side.

The first-floor bedroom, we discover, is unusable because the adjoining bathroom has no bath. A bidet sits in splendor in the only part of the room big enough for a tub. We trade out the bidet so the bedroom can be used by guests who are unable to climb stairs.

We solve the telephone problem by switching to wireless phones—an expensive novelty in Italy at the time—so we can carry the handset around the villa with us. An answering machine gives us backup for calls we miss.

Even the burglar alarm can be improved. We combine the separate upstairs and downstairs systems. We also remove some internal sensors that require our bedroom suite to be isolated at night from the rest of the villa.

We see all these little projects as part of an effort to liberate the inherent livability of Palladio's villa. Carl is all wet about King Kong.

Early one evening, as we sit on the south portico for our customary prosecco, munching a wedge of
Montasio
cheese and tangy green olives, we hear a drone overhead, approaching from a distance. The sound grows to a loud racket, as if a flying lawn mower were about to land on top of us. Then, barely skimming above the tips of our tall Lombardy poplars, an ultralight flashes into view. We are so startled to find such madness in Italy that we almost miss the pilot's friendly wave of his hand as the plane banks and swings away, heading toward Loreggia.

The ultralight reappears two weeks later and again ten days after that. Each time the pilot makes a distinct gesture in our direction before continuing on his low flight across the fields to the south. We are left wondering who our devil-may-care friend can be, confident that we have never personally met him.

One day as I walk down Via Roma to the
panificio
I am hailed by a
“Signora, signora”
and turn to find a short, jovial man with a broad smile.

“You are the
signora
from the villa, yes?” he asks. I confirm that I am.

“I am Umberto Nepitali,” he says with pride. “I wave at you from my airplane.” We chat for a few minutes and go our ways. In future months Carl and I continue to see him in the air and occasionally on the ground. We exchange waves or a few cordial words. I come to recognize Umberto's wife as well, another garrulous mesomorph, who has round brown eyes and a round smile. She delivers mail around Piombino Dese on her blue-and-white Vespa.

Returning to Piombino Dese the following spring, I offer my usual
“Salve, Umberto! Come statf”
as we pass each other near the
municipio
.

“Ah, Signora Sally, I feel like dying,” he replies, to my alarm. “If I didn't have a sixteen-year-old son, I would kill myself.”

Umberto tells me his wife was crushed under a truck while making her mail deliveries during the winter.

Later Silvana tells me that Umberto has sold his ultralight.

Carl and I stop by Luigina's
pasticceria
on our way home from the post office. Today is Monday, the Miolos’ Caffe Palladio is closed, and we need the caloric rush of a cappuccino and brioche. As we are paying to leave, an attractive woman is ordering a tray of pastries to take out. She is accompanied by a beautiful little girl with huge dark eyes, pale skin, and curly dark-chocolate hair in ponytails secured by ribbons pulled up high above her ears.

“Ah, ehe bella!”
I exclaim.
“Quanti anni ha?
How old is she?”

“Diciotto mesi
. Eighteen months,” the woman responds with a smile. “She's my daughter's child. I keep her every day.”

“How fortunate you are to have your granddaughter so close!”

“Si,”
she agrees. She hesitates briefly, then finally volunteers, “My daughter is not married. She is not yet nineteen—too young to be married—and must complete school first. She and her
fidanzato
will marry when they finish.”

She pauses. The little girl laughs up at me, then grabs her grandmother's legs.

“My daughter cried a lot at first, my husband and I cried a lot,” the grandmother continues. “But then when our daughter went to
the hospital and
she
was born”—looking down at the smiling child—”we were so happy! We
are
so happy. Our daughter will finish school and then be able to marry and raise her daughter.”

She gathers up her package of pastries and, her granddaughter in her arms, bids us
“Buona giornata,”
and heads for her car in the piazza opposite.

Our Venetan friends wear their emotions like clothes. Joy, grief, anguish are paraded before everyone in a way vastly different from my American experience. We Americans share our joys easily, but consider it a strength to contain our grief. We praise a widow or widower for “composure” at the funeral of a spouse. If we have conflicting feelings about the birth of a grandchild out of wedlock, we do not share them with a total stranger at a pastry shop. We would not declare thoughts of suicide to a casual acquaintance on the sidewalk. Venetans find in the visible display of strong emotions both a demonstration of character and a therapy. Emotions are stylized; grand gesture or dramatic expression is required to convey adequately one's humanity. If a friend's mother has died recently, the friend will delineate in exact detail the depth and breadth of her sorrow, and she will expect you to inquire of her feeling of loss for several months so she can render another chorus of her grief. This ritual clearly benefits those who mourn, allowing them to talk about the deceased, to reminisce, weep, and extol the virtues of their beloved. It acknowledges an acceptance of the totality of life, the understanding that bad things happen to everyone and that you must express your loss or confusion so it can be left behind.

Andrea Palladio is a constant presence in my thoughts when I am at Villa Cornaro. I wonder how he would like the flowers I've just
placed on the dining-room table. Would he approve of the furnishings we have? I know he'd like our kitchen! And I believe he would be profoundly satisfied to see how flexible and adaptable his creation has been through the centuries for a succession of families with different needs and lifestyles.

Carl and I rented Ingmar Bergman's
Wild Strawberries
one evening last month in Atlanta. The film was obliquely interesting but inscrutable when I first saw it years ago while still in college. I was prompted to watch it again because it came up in a conversation with our college classmate Nina and her husband Frank, who recently stayed with us at the villa. Carl and Frank were discussing Erik Erikson's pioneering work
Childhood and Society
, in which Erikson posits that a person typically passes through seven “crises” in life, including an “identity crisis” in one's late teens or early twenties and an “integrity crisis” toward the end of one's career. As an undergraduate Carl took a course Erikson taught. At the point for discussing the integrity crisis, Erikson canceled his lecture and told the class to report to the Brattle, a local theater, for a private showing of
Wild Strawberries
. Erikson said the film conveyed all the class needed to know about the integrity crisis.

The story follows an elderly retired professor of medicine through the day on which he receives a prestigious honorary doctorate from his university. He revisits in his mind key episodes in his personal and professional past and rethinks his life decisions in an effort to assess his own worthiness. With Erikson's analysis as context, the film upon re-viewing is not inscrutable at all.

I wonder if Palladio ever had an integrity crisis. He was sixty-two years old when he published his
Four Books
in 1570. Was it, I speculate with Carl, the product of an integrity crisis? Carl says no; he believes
Four Books
was part of Palladio's recurring campaign to be appointed
proto
or chief architect of Venice, a goal that always eluded him.

Any integrity crisis Palladio might have had would quickly pass if he were to see the vibrant life of his Villa Cornaro today, some 450 years after he created it. Perhaps he would come on the day the
svantaggi
visit. Once a year, on a Sunday afternoon in May, the park of the villa fills with fifty or so young adults at play, kicking soccer balls, circling about in games. A casual observer at first might not notice anything awry. Then he would wonder about so many balls veering at obtuse angles into the lake bed, errant kicks crushing the begonias that circle the fountain. At last he would spot several young women sitting immobile and blank-faced in folding chairs placed in the shade of the poplars. He would realize that more than half of the participants are mentally or physically handicapped. The others are members of a local volunteer association of young adults who gather the handicapped of the area for an outing every two weeks.

During their visit one year, as I watch the event from the south portico of the villa, Marina Bighin walks up the steps to join me. Marina is the
parrucchiera
(hairdresser) whose shop is in the former
barchessa
of the villa, with her family's apartment to the rear and above. As an occasional customer, I carry memories of Marina at work in her busy shop, chattering, laughing, translating into Italian for me when there has been some choice comment in Venetan that she thinks I should hear, her own neck-length, neon-bright auburn hair swinging all the while with her rapid movements.

Her face is somber now as she sits beside me to study the crowd at play in the park.

“My life hasn't turned out the way I thought it would,” she says. Her twenty-year-old younger son Giovanni stands beside us, performing intricate repetitive motions with his large hands, as if playing an invisible oboe. Giovanni is autistic. Like most handicapped people in Italy, even the severely handicapped, he lives at home with his family.

For many years Marina's mother provided much of Giovanni's care. Since her mother's death, Marina, her husband, Roberto, and their older son, Francesco, are left to manage Giovanni on their own. Marina and Roberto cherish the hope that Giovanni's condition can be treated and that he will recover to assume an independent life. They scour the Internet for news of new treatments and,
for now, are optimistic about an herbal/vitamin program from the United States.

Roberto teaches history in a nearby school; Francesco began his photographic career by winning a national competition, and now he photographs art objects for the province of Padua; Marina operates her shop with two employees. Before her mother died, Marina and Roberto would dash off to classical music concerts as far away as Vicenza and Venice, often inviting me to accompany them. They would attend and critique for me every art show in the Veneto. Roberto, a good oil portraitist himself, was a regular participant in local exhibitions. Marina's dinner parties were grand displays of cooking skills and artistic presentation.

Their lives are quieter now. One or the other of them must stay home evenings unless Francesco can take their place, and Francesco must plan his life in anticipation of assuming Giovanni's care when his parents can no longer cope with it. For now, Marina and Roberto have postponed plans to visit us in Atlanta. They must wait until Giovanni is better, they say, and can get along without them.

Four workers hammer the final nails into a thirty-foot-wide wooden stage constructed over the lower portion of the villa's south steps. Their tools bang a crazy arrhythmic melody in the midday heat. Other workers align three hundred plastic chairs in rows across our park. Tomorrow night the renowned Solisti Veneti are scheduled to play a Vivaldi concert as part of a summer series sponsored by the province of Padova.