On the Shores of the Mediterranean. Eric Newby

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СКАЧАТЬ together with the Villa Capra at Vicenza, the most famous Palladian villas – which stands on its right bank near Mestre under what is now almost invariably a sulphurous sky, with the plants and factories of the Industrial Zone creeping closer to it every year. They built them on the banks of the Sile, which emerges as a pond full of vegetation in the plain west of Treviso and bubbles and seethes its way through this charming little city, apparently unpolluted. And they built them along the Terraglio, now a nightmare road, Strada Statale 13, between Mestre and Treviso, where villas with the sonorous names of past and present owners – Villa Gatterburg ora Volpi, Villa Duodo Malice ora Zoppolate (shades of Villa Newby), some in vast parks full of planes and cedars, with statues on the cornices looming against the sky – are today hemmed in by filling stations and windowless factories painted in bilious colours. And they built them in the depths of the country, miles from anywhere.

      The Venetians went to their villas by gondola, or in the large rowing barges called burchielli, which had a sort of miniature villa on top of them in which the passengers could shield themselves from the elements and from the vulgar gaze. When there was no waterway leading to their villas, they travelled by ox-cart, which must have been pretty uncomfortable.

      Their movements were as regular as those of migrant birds. The exodus from the city began on the eve of St Anthony’s Day in June and they stayed in the country until the end of July, after which they went back to the city. On October the first they went to the country again and in November, at the end of St Martin’s Summer, the time when the last grapes are picked which were not ripe at the vendemmia in October, they returned to Venice for a round of theatres and masked routs. As Venice declined, so the diversions increased in extravagance.

      At night in their villas they gambled until dawn, unless there was some other diversion. They rose late, to watch other people cultivating their gardens and their vines, to visit their labyrinths, contemplate great nature, ponder further improvements and, as time went on, contemplate and ponder their diminished bank balances. For the Venetians were seldom content with one villa. It was not uncommon for a single family to own a dozen. At one time the Pisani owned fifty. More than two thousand villas are still in existence in the Veneto.

Of the great Venetian villas the grandest is the Pisani family’s villa at Stra¹ on the Brenta Canal east of Padua, which has huge stables, a labyrinth, a fantastic gateway-cum-belvedere flanked by columns encircled by spiral staircases and crowned with statuary; and on the ceiling of the ballroom frescoes of angels blowing trumpets, putti, eighteenth-century gentry, one of them well placed between the thighs of a naked lady who has temporarily landed on a cloud, and what look like Red Indians, all by Giambattista Tiepolo, forever whirling across a pale blue sky. Another huge villa is the Villa Manin, at Passariano, south-west of Udine, which is so large that its outlines actually show up on the 1:200,000 Touring Club Italiano map. This was the villa built for the last Doge, Lodovico Manin, and with its immense all-embracing arcaded wings it resembles a small town rather than a habitation. The smallest of the villas is the exquisite Casa Quaglia – the Quail House – built in the fourteenth century at Paese, west of Treviso, now a shamefully neglected farmhouse, which has Venetian Gothic windows and a facade painted in the form of a tapestry with fabulous animals.

      Some, however, like the one inherited by the girl in the bar at Florian’s, are in decay. In a typical one of this sort, if it is big, several families of contadini may live in the barchesse, the curving wings, which spring from a central block in which most of the windows have been bricked up on the lower floor. Inside, the immense salon on the piano nobile, in which the ceiling may be entirely covered with seventeenth-century frescoes of gods and goddesses floating in the air, may also be half full of corn on the cob. There are great cracks in the ceiling, the door openings are covered with tattered sacking, and one day, soon, it will collapse.

      ‘How would you like to spend the evening?’ I asked, opening my favourite guide book. According to this, the Guide Julliard de l’Europe, there are four intelligent ways to spend an evening in Venice: the first and dearest is to hire a gondola (a closed one if one has improper thoughts and the means to gratify them); the second is to install oneself at a table in the Piazza San Marco; the third to look for adventures in the streets and alleys; the fourth to go to bed with a good book and a bottle of Scotch. ‘When one has tried all these,’ the authors say, ‘there are the night clubs.’

      ‘I know which one you’d choose,’ Wanda said, ‘but you can’t hire those closed gondolas any more.’

      ‘I wouldn’t choose any of them on a night like this.’

      ‘What time’s the train?’

      ‘Eight forty-five. It’s half past five now. I think we should go. I’m awfully hungry. We can have dinner at that place near the Colleoni monument. What do you call it?’

      ‘You mean the Trattoria alle Bandierette.’

      ‘Yes, that’ll take at least twenty minutes in this weather. We’d better telephone them and see if they can feed us around six-thirty. Then, by the time we’ve walked to the station, or if it’s going we might get the circolare2 from the Fondamente Nuove, and get the bags out of the deposito, we shall just make it. Lucky we booked to go by train. We’d look pretty silly with plane tickets for London on a night like this.’

      ‘I’m glad we’re going home,’ Wanda said, who gets fed up when it’s cold, as she had done once in Siberia. ‘Just for now I’ve had enough of travelling and enough of the Mediterranean. I want to sleep in my own bed for a bit.’

¹ Now owned by the state, which has such great difficulty in finding custodians that it is frequently closed in winter.

      ² There are two services of water buses that circle Venice in opposite directions, Service No. 5 Circolare sinistra and destra.

       PART TWO THE ADRIATIC

       On the Way to the Balkans

      One of the problems about travelling round the Mediterranean under your own steam and not as part of a group is the cost of transportation. Luckily, by one of those miracles to which we fortunately are no strangers, we were offered a trip back to Venice, which we had so capriciously abandoned because it was foggy, on the inaugural run of the Venice – Simplon – Orient Express.

      The scenes at Victoria before this inaugural train was hauled away by a humdrum British diesel (it had not been possible to use steam engines on any sections of the route because of lack of steam train facilities) were memorable for anyone interested in such trivia, which included us. For the first time for many a day the rich, or those making a stab at being thought to be so, like ourselves, could be seen travelling together and the station was awash with what Veblen described in his Theory of the Leisure Class as ‘conspicuous consumption’.

      It had been suggested that we come dressed in the manner of the thirties and as a result pre-1939 taxis and motor cars of the same period hired from specialist hire firms were rolling up, СКАЧАТЬ