VIII.vi. Barbaro

"A Master, then, is he who can express new things that others understand."
- Carlo Scarpa

Our four-day visit of the Veneto Villas was, until the final afternoon, unaffected by the dire weather predictions that had preoccupied my planning. It had spat rain as we donned the slippers compulsory to the visit of Villa Barbaro, perhaps the greatest of them all, the fruit of a concerted collaboration between Palladio, the superlative architect, and Veronese, the greatest large-scale painter of the age. Still lived in, some of Villa Barbaro's rooms are amusingly sealed off with removable glass panels, allowing the curious visitor to peer into the off limits, fully-furnished rooms still used by the owners. Stuffy leather furniture, mementoes of all sorts, portraits of military men, all these things contrast with the light, almost Arcadian frescoes. In one room, a spotted terrier peers out from one of the walls, painted in trompe l'oeil. The family that inhabits the place seems to be a tenacious bunch; could the State buy the place, it would. Veronese-frescoed Palladian Villas don't grow on the willow groves that stretch to the damp horizons, either those painted in jest on the walls or in the real landscape that extends beyond the windows.
    The genius of Italy, though, didn't end in the sixteenth century, something about which I need constant reminders. I suppose my tolerance for the pre and slightly post Raphaelite is far greater that that of most people. I knew this, and planned accordingly. On our itinerary was a supposedly extraordinary creation by the modernist architect Carlo Scarpa, a cemetery tomb in an otherwise unremarkable village. Unfortunately, the cemetery we eventually found was the wrong one, and it took my asking of a poor mourning woman where the Scarpa was.
    Eventually, we found the place, an odd concrete construction, like something out of another world, the anti-type to the Palladian Villa. Sophie and Gerry loved it, both of them having been builders in their former lives. I was pleasantly surprised, too, by this strange arc, and it was a welcome contrast to the rest of the sites we visited.


In front of Villa Emo in the rain


Mom and Sophie in the Gardens of Villa Pisani


A Lichen-Covered Statue