Palladian Days (26 page)

“Un gocciolo di vino, signora?”
one of the workers shouts when he sees me observing from the portico. An English shout follows:
“A
tipple of wine you like?”

These same workers appear once, twice, or more each year to build and then dismantle a
palco
—as they call the stage platform— and deploy the chairs. I am honored they ask me to share their wine.

Once or twice a year—sometimes three or four times—we are asked by the
comune
of Piombino Dese or the province of Padua to allow the presentation of some musical or theatrical event in the park. We always agree, subject to a few ground rules designed to protect the villa. For example, we do not allow trucks carrying electronic or stage gear to drive onto the grass, and we insist that a special electric feed be connected for the lighting instead of risking a major overload to the villa's electric circuits. For choral works the performers simply stand on the south steps of the villa, but most events require construction of a temporary
palco
to give a flat performing surface.

Weather is always a risk. There seems to be a variation of Murphy's Law at work: scheduling an outdoor performance at the villa can bring rain in the midst of the deepest drought. The “Sawdust-Pile Effect,” Carl calls it. Fifty years ago an uncle of his in Mississippi owned some land that had once been the site of a sawmill. A large sawdust pile had been left behind. Carl's uncle tried to burn it but found that whenever he lit the pile, the sky would cloud over and rain would extinguish the fire. He abandoned his efforts to eliminate the sawdust, but during dry periods he would still light the pile because of the certainty that it would bring rain.

Saturday morning arrives dark and overcast. Light showers drift through the park intermittently all day until about five. Then the clouds dissipate to reveal a brilliantly striated orange-red sunset.

Claudio Scimone, the tall, elegant director of Solisti Veneti, arrives to assess his options. On the one hand, the rain is gone for good. On the other, the felt carpet on the stage is soaked and humidity hangs heavy in the air. Don Aldo has agreed that the concert can be held in the church sanctuary if necessary. Maestro Scimone, however, knows that many in the audience will have been attracted to the concert because of the setting in the villa's park.
Ever the professional, he decides to proceed with the concert outdoors as planned. The attendance is SRO; the music is glorious. Sci-mone knows how to deal with the weather: he pauses between movements to allow his string players to retune their instruments.

An orchestral concert on the south portico steps

James Galway is performing in the grand salon of Villa Emo, the Palladian villa in nearby Fanzolo di Vedelago. More than a hundred folding chairs crowd the room. The Irish flutist, adorned with flaming red tie and cummerbund, stands and sways like a happy tropical bird. Sweet notes from his silver instrument, amplified by the terrazzo floor, suffuse the room and seduce our ears. The walls of the room are frescoed with immense figures of pagan gods and goddesses who leer down disdainfully from their trompe l'oeil ledges, indignant at the invasion of their quiet evening solitude.

Carl and I attend the concert as guests of the Asolo Music Festival, its sponsor. The fall of the Berlin Wall has inspired the festival management to make ambitious plans for a Russian music
program for the coming summer, including performances by the legendary Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter and Moscow's Shostakovich Quartet. Richter will play in the eighteenth-century Teatro Accademico at Castelfranco. The Shostakovich Quartet, if Carl and I agree, will perform in the grand salon of Villa Cornaro. Our invitation to the Galway concert is intended to convince us that an indoor concert will not damage our villa.

Galway's recital reminds me why I love chamber music more than any other musical form. The intimacy of the setting creates a union with the strangers around me as we experience the exquisite sounds together. I'm ready to sign on for the Shostakovich Quartet, but Carl is more cautious. He points out that the floor of the grand salon at Villa Emo is a replacement done in terrazzo, while our floor is the original terra-cotta tile—vastly more fragile. There is already evidence of damage to our tile in several spots, vestiges of a piano recital held there shortly before we acquired the villa.

The principal danger, of course, will come from the feet of the audience's chairs. We finally consent to the concert after agreement on two safeguards: the tile floor must be protected with not one but two layers of carpet, and the quartet itself must play from a low wooden platform designed to spread the weight over a broader area.

The following summer the festival staff show all the care they have promised. My own secret fear that the carpet will deaden the sound of the instruments proves entirely unfounded. The acoustics are perfect; without the carpet the sound might have been too bright. The grand salon and the entrance hall accommodate 165 chairs, but the crowd overflows onto the south and north porticos. The performance itself—an all-Prokofiev program—is one of the great musical experiences of my life, heightened by pride that these masterful musicians are playing in my own home. Emperor loseph II must have felt that way when Mozart played.

I have become an impresario myself.

During a trip back to Cambridge for a meeting of the Radcliffe College board of trustees, I am approached by a representative of
the Radcliffe Choral Society. The RCS is planning a European tour for next summer and is searching for some reason to extend its trip into Italy. Can I arrange a performance for the group in Piombino Dese? All they need is a place to perform—plus room and board for two days and nights for fifty people!

“Piombino doesn't even have a hotel,” I start to protest. “You can't stay in people's homes, because no one speaks English.”

Then I stop to think. What a great cultural event this would be for both Piombino Dese and the RCS—and a great musical experience as well! Many of my happiest moments as an undergraduate were spent singing with the RCS, so I agree to contact the
comune
of Piombino Dese and its Pro Loco, the civic group that sponsors musical events in town.

As soon as I return to Piombino Dese I search out Sergio For-mentin, president of Pro Loco. Sergio is Ernesto Formentin's younger son. A foot taller than his father, Sergio has bright red hair and a cheerful, positive manner. I explain the “opportunity.”

“Can we find local families to host forty-five young college women?” I ask, calculating that Carl and I can host five ourselves.

“Yes, of course,” he replies after only a moment's hesitation. He speaks with a lot more confidence than I feel myself. Nonetheless, we agree to proceed: Piombino Dese will be the final stop on the RCS European tour.

I phone my friends in Piombino Dese and encourage them to open their homes; Sergio's organization contacts others. We exchange and coordinate our lists. Francesca Scquizzato commits to host four singers; Livio Formentin, Ernesto's brother, also takes four; Nazzareno Mason, Silvana's uncle, accepts two. A number of people I don't know join in as well. More quickly than I ever expected, the housing seems in place.

Sergio's Pro Loco handles publicity for the concert, though little is needed. Every family in town is hosting someone or knows someone who is.
Manifesti
appear in every shopwindow Genuine anticipation is afoot in the town.

The day of their arrival dawns, but we are in the grip of the

Sawdust-Pile Effect. The RCS bus pulls into the piazza at the
municipio
in the midst of a steady gray downpour. The square is jammed with the cars of host families come to collect their guests. Chaos reigns as we shuffle about under umbrellas, assigning students to hosts and trying to keep track of who has been sent where. We set a rendezvous time for the following morning. The choir's director Jameson Marvin and his associate director, together with three singers, come home with Carl and me.

Over glasses of prosecco and bites of sweet Asiago cheese, we share a hope that no student will go to bed hungry because she and her host family could not communicate the word for supper. We also discuss backup strategy in case the rain continues. Don Aldo, happy to learn that the RCS tour began at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris and might end in his own parish church, has confirmed that the church sanctuary is available as an alternative site.

When the singers convene at the villa Saturday morning, ducking inside to escape the continuing rain, we give them a quick tour. We also explain how to catch a train into Venice from the station just one block away. Because they will have only a few hours available for touring Venice, I distribute
“A
6o-Second Guide to Venice” (included as an appendix, on page 263), which Carl has prepared for the occasion.

By midafternoon the continuing rain makes it clear that an outdoor concert will be impossible. Carl and I take Jim Marvin and his associate to the church to review the layout and acoustics. After testing the liveliness of the acoustics, Jim makes the remarkable decision to place his singers four feet from one another in a vocally heterogeneous mix, a first soprano standing next to a first alto or a second soprano, and so on.

All forty-eight singers troop into the sanctuary at 8:00 p.m. and begin warming up their voices. Goose bumps cover my arms, so ethereal and beautiful is their sound. The repertoire being primarily Renaissance a capella works, the singers’ tones reverberate from the marble, granite, and brick surfaces like palpable acoustic jewels.

During the concert, each woman sings confidently and with a
sweet tone; vibrato is at a minimum, and the sound produced is a miracle of clarity, pitch, and phrasing. Into my mind pops the image of
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
in the Cornaro Chapel in Rome. The audience of six hundred, completely filling the church, feels the same intimation of perfection. Don Aldo does as well. He springs to his feet at the conclusion, exclaiming,
“Come angeli, voi cantate come angeli!
Like angels, you sing like angels!”

Rice vs. potatoes. The controversy has loomed larger in our marriage than any dispute over the Civil War (or, as Carl's mother explained to me, the War of Northern Aggression). When Ashley was ten years old and we were discussing her school assignment, she asked, “Daddy, why did we lose the Civil War?”

I interrupted. “What do you mean,
we
lost the Civil War?”

“Well,” she clarified, pausing only briefly, “Daddy and I lost the Civil War.”

Potatoes appeared nightly on our New Hampshire dinner table when I was growing up. Whether because of my parents’ dietary preferences or their cities of origin—Muskogee, Oklahoma; and Edinburgh, Scotland—or because my mother believed potatoes had more nutritional value than rice, we ate potatoes: baked, mashed, hash brown, pan-roasted.

Carl, growing up in South Carolina, ate enough rice and gravy to fill Colonial Lake—Uncle Ben's rice, with thick, calorie-laden gravy. His mother, as expert at southern cooking as Francesca Scquizzato is at Italian, taught me how to make a good gravy during the Christmas holidays following our June wedding. (The temperature in Charleston hit 720 on Christmas Day, and I wondered if I'd made a mistake marrying a southerner.) Nonetheless, I rarely prepare rice and gravy, assuring Carl that the extra ten thousand
calories are bad for him. The real reason I don't fix rice and gravy is that I don't
like
rice and gravy.

Risotto, more valuable than a marriage counselor, is a delicious and creative combination of a special kind of rice and almost any other ingredients you want. The ubiquitous specialty appears on most restaurant menus and in every home in northern Italy. It has become a “community” dish in my mind because its preparation requires constant stirring; if guests or family want another dish served in addition to risotto, they must join me in the kitchen and stir, keeping me company while I prepare something else. “What's your favorite Italian food?” ask many American friends. “What do you eat over there?” What we eat most often is one version or another of risotto.

I decide to embark on a quest for The Perfect Risotto, determined to pin down the best recipe in the entire Veneto and disseminate it to our U.S. friends.
Note to diary: Print risotto recipe on Christmas card?
Armed with curiosity, paper, pencil, and Italian friends possessed of great culinary skills and vast imaginations, I sally forth to learn The Truth about risotto.

But it's not that simple, I find, when I begin polling my favorite Italian cooks. So much is a matter of individual taste—that, and how your mother prepared risotto.

The essential risotto is made by sauteing a chopped onion in oil and/or butter; adding condiments, rice, and broth; then crowning the creation with butter and Parmesan cheese. But that is like saying that a Palladian villa is composed of bricks and
intonaco
, or that a Monteverdi madrigal consists of notes and staves. While each of my friends indulges personal idiosyncrasies in risotto preparation, five areas of agreement emerge from my sleuthing: