Frigid Grandeur: Palazzo Zenobio, W.D. Howells, and A Shiver of Recognition

Palazzo Zenobio's Sala degli Specchi

Last Sunday, on a cold foggy afternoon, I found myself for the first time in Palazzo Zenobio, which is also known as the Collegio Armeno Moorat Raphael, as it's been the property of the Padri Armeni Mechitaristi di Venezia since 1850, and remains a center for Armenian studies. It was open to the public last Sunday day because it's currently hosting a large exhibition of contemporary painting, about which I think it best for me to politely refrain from commenting. It wasn't to my taste, but I encourage anyone in town to check it out and form their own opinion.  

What struck me, though, was not the exhibition, and not only the notable late Baroque decoration of the palazzo, but the cold. The entire place was unheated--so that my ungloved hands quickly became stiff and numb--and the experience of walking among its many icy rooms reminded me that not all that long ago (at least in terms of the long history of Venice) it was not uncommon for even the grandest Venetian palaces to be without heating.  

After more than 7 years of living in Venice I recognized that I was finally experiencing first-hand and on a grand scale what I'd only previously read about, most memorably in William Dean Howell's marvelous account of living in Venice in the 1860s entitled Venetian Life. 

Now that the end of winter is in view perhaps it's a good time to post a large excerpt from Howell's description of unheated palazzi and how, more generally, 19th-century Venetians made it (or suffered through) the season. On a sunny day like today in Venice, after a rather long stretch of wet gray weather (including a window-rattling run of bora winds from the northeast), it's finally possible to read the passage below without an uncomfortable shiver of sympathy.

The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure a degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer equally with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the cold, objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the effort to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It is not a pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the affliction among people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh you out sugar, by no means reconciles the Northern stomach to its prevalence. I have observed that priests, and those who have much to do in the frigid churches, are the worst sufferers in this way; and I think no one can help noting in the harsh, raw winter-complexion (for in summer the tone is quite different) of the women of all classes, the protest of systems cruelly starved of the warmth which health demands.

The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in summer, and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very large, lofty, and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of apartments—the smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the winter, and the grander and airier chambers and saloons above, for defence against the insidious heats of the sirocco. But, for the most part, people must occupy the same room summer and winter, the sole change being in the strip of carpet laid meagrely before the sofa during the latter season. In the comparatively few houses where carpets are the rule and not the exception, they are always removed during the summer—for the triple purpose of sparing them some months’ wear, banishing fleas and other domestic insects, and showing off the beauty of the oiled and shining pavement, which in the meanest houses is tasteful, and in many of the better sort is often in-wrought with figures and designs of mosaic work.

All the floors in Venice are of stone, and [...] all the floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with their feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled in furs and wadded gowns. When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too heavy, but it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian sometimes wears it. Indeed, the sun is recognized by Venetians as the only legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous prices to such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.

It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are exposed to the utmost rigor of the winter, and people spend as much of their time as possible in the open air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm afternoon sun in its whole extent, and is then thronged with promenaders of every class, condition, age, and sex; and whenever the sun shines in the Piazza, shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. At night men crowd the close little caffè, where they reciprocate smoke, respiration, and animal heat, and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and beguile the time with solemn loafing, [Footnote: I permit myself, throughout this book, the use of the expressive American words loaf and loafer, as the only terms adequate to the description of professional idling in Venice] and the perusal of dingy little journals, drinking small cups of black coffee, and playing long games of chess,—an evening that seemed to me as torpid and lifeless as a Lap’s, and intolerable when I remembered the bright, social winter evenings of another and happier land and civilization.

Sometimes you find a heated stove—that is to say, one in which there has been a fire during the day—in a Venetian house; but the stove seems usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or else to be engaged only in diffusing a very acrid smoke,—as if the Venetian preferred to take warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The stove itself is a curious structure, and built commonly of bricks and plastering,—whitewashed and painted outside. It is a great consumer of fuel, and radiates but little heat. By dint of constant wooding I contrived to warm mine; but my Italian friends always avoided its vicinity when they came to see me, and most amusingly regarded my determination to be comfortable as part of the eccentricity inseparable from the Anglo-Saxon character.

 I daresay they would not trifle with winter, thus, if they knew him in his northern moods. But the only voluntary concession they make to his severity is the scaldino, and this is made chiefly by the yielding sex, who are denied the warmth of the caffè. The use of the scaldino is known to all ranks, but it is the women of the poorer orders who are most addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed earthen-ware, having an earthen bale: and with this handle passed over the arm, and the pot full of bristling charcoal, the Veneziana’s defense against cold is complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room to room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been my fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting over the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while she sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with religion, baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino. In one of the public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the walls, intended to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea of the four seasons. There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization of Spring, Summer, and Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by a fine lady dressed in furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned foot-stool, and a scaldino in her lap! When we talk of being invaded in the north, we poetize the idea of defense by the figure of defending our hearthstones. Alas! could we fight for our sacred scaldini?

The entire text of Howell's Venetian Life can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenburg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7083.

It's one of the best books from any period that I've read on Venice, and I can't imagine another 19th-century book in English that even comes close to giving such a full and entertaining account of Venetian life.

For a bit more about Howells, and some images of one of the Grand Canal palazzi in which he lived during his four years in Venice as the United States consul, visit http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2013/11/william-dean-howells-and-others-in.html

A 180 degree panorama of the Sala degli Specchi

D'Annunzio, Ca' d'Oro, the Casetta Rossa, and Venice

 A panorama of Ca' D'Oro's androne mosaic                                    photo credit: Sandro

The ground floor courtyard (or androne) of Ca' d'Oro is probably the most exotic and evocative space of its kind in Venice. But while the palace's famous facade exemplifies 15th-century Venetian architectural taste at its "most decorative and florid" (according to Deborah Howard in her Architectural History of Venice), the androne displays the connoisseurship and refined turn-of-the-20th-century taste of Baron Franchetti, who restored the "Venetian-ness" to a space that had been gutted by the famous ballerina Mademoiselle Taglioni in the mid-nineteenth century. (Taglioni, to John Ruskin's horror, had torn out the palace's beautiful external 15th-century staircase, its ornate portal over the street entrance, and its wellhead, among many other barbarous alterations.)

In 1896 as Franchetti himself was busy on his hands and knees arranging the rare colored stones of the androne's beautiful mosaic pavement (modeled on the 12th-century floor of Murano's church of Santa Maria e San Donato) another well-known, highly-cultured, connoisseur of the time was often right beside him, helping out: Gabriele D'Annunzio.

The colorful, elaborately-patterned floor of Ca'D'Oro serves as a guiding image of the biographical method of Lucy Hughes-Hallett's excellent 2013 biography of D'Annunzio, entitled The Pike in the UK, and Gabriele D'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War in the US.

Though little-known in the US, where his extravagant language and self-consciously-literary decadence isn't really to the national taste (even if his militarism and twin obsessions with youth and conscienceless individual power might find a ready audience), D'Annunzio serves in Hughes-Hallet's book as a fascinating and complex prism through which to see the young state of Italy at the end of the 19th-century and its disastrous attempts to forge a strong national identity in the first decades of the 20th.

In this sense, it's an overview of Italian culture and politics of this period, using one of the country's most famous and influential figures as a focal point.

Though bearing no physical resemblance to his virile ideal, D'Annunzio was something of a proto-rock star: with all the fame, the crowds, the mass adoration, the groupies, the excess, the drugs (he loved cocaine), the world-famous lovers (eg, Eleonora Duse), the celebrity perks, the influence, the entitlement, and the unquestioned authority.

But not even the most celebrated of rock stars has managed to do what D'Annunzio did after World War I in the former Venetian territory of Istria: establish his own little proto-Fascist nation-state in the port town of Fiume, with himself as dictator, which he held for nearly a year and a half while the allied victors of the Great War tried to figure out what to do with both the region and him.

D'Annunzio's time in Venice makes up just a part of his mad life, but it's such a significant part--and he plays so colorful a part in the history of the city--that I'm tempted to call Hughes-Hallett's entertaining and well-researched biography a must read for any lover of Venice.

Forget about the famous love affairs he carried on here, the theatrical premieres of his work and all the other kinds of drama, the years he spent here during World War I alone will alter your sense of the Grand Canal and the Casetta Rossa: that little red palazzo set back from the water by a small garden right beside the immense facade of the Palazzo Corner (now seat of the Province and Prefect of Venice), and across the water from the Guggenheim Museum.

The Casetta Rossa this afternoon: an engraved commemorative plaque of D'Annunzio's habitation there is set into the garden railing at right, but its worn letters are almost impossible to make out even in person

Having used his celebrity to obtain an officer's commission in the newly-hatched Italian Air Force (though by this time he was already over 50 years of age), D'Annunzio would be chauffeured in a motor boat from what he called this "doll's house" on the Grand Canal--rented for a pittance from his pal the Austrian Prince Frederick von Hohenlohe--to the airport on Lido, from which he would set off on regular bombing raids against those he described in unceasingly inflammatory public pronouncements as Italy's "ancestoral enemies" and the loathsome spawn of a nation he likened to a "vulture vomiting human flesh": the countrymen, that is, of his landlord.

Then after quite literally dropping bombs, or sometimes, in the case of a dangerous foray over Trieste, pamphlets of his own creation; after surviving anti-aircraft fire and the brutally frigid and perilous conditions of early air warfare, he'd return to his palazetto on the Grand Canal to soak in a hot bath, powder and perfume himself and, amid the 18th-century furniture and ornaments collected by his Austrian benefactor, entertain one of his many female friends or admirers.

After a year of increasingly daring raids, D'Annunzio's luck ran out. Temporarily, at least. His plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and D'Annunzio was blinded when his head smashed into the machine gun mounted in front of his seat. He'd eventually regain sight in one eye, but only after three months of lying motionless on his back in a completely blacked-out room of the Casetta Rossa.

He would, in fact, return, one-eyed, to his bombing raids--against medical advice. And, having escaped death, he'd go on to even greater prominence, power, and influence, not least of all with Benito Mussolini, with whom he had an uneasy relationship. (D'Annunzio recognized that Mussolini had basically stolen some of his best material and methods and, though uncouth and vulgar, was enjoying the power that D'Annunzio believed rightfully should have belonged to himself. Mussolini, meanwhile, keen on presenting himself as the political heir to Italy's world-famous nationalist poet, felt obligated to flatter the older man, and showered him with extravagant gifts (such as installing the front half of an actual battleship, complete with sailors, on D'Annunzio's property near Lake Garda), saying "When a decayed tooth cannot be pulled out it is capped with gold.").

For anyone interested in Venice, Hughes-Hallett's book does what all all the best books about the city do: it enlivens and enriches one's sense of this peculiar little place which, in spite of its long history, can sometimes subside into merely the collection of beautiful monuments and picturesque views it's long been sold as. It re-orients one's personal map of the city, freighting previously unnoticed areas with new significance, and, more generally, it offers a compelling perspective on the early years of the nation of Italy.   

Looking Out the Front Door of Palazzo Contarini Polignac, This Afternoon

Both Ca' Barbaro and--almost directly across the Grand Canal from it--Palazzo Contarini-Polignac are hosting Biennale exhibitions from now into November, which means not only do you have a chance to see some interesting contemporary art gratis, but also to see the interiors of two of the most beautiful and celebrated palazzi in the city. Having visited both palazzi today, I can tell you that both places and both exhibitions merit a visit, and I'll post some images from each in the next few days. But, lacking time at the moment, I hope this view out from the water gate of Palazzo Contarini-Polignac will suffice for now.

Cole Porter at Ca' Rezzonico

If you take a vaporetto to Ca' Rezzonico, and get off at the stop just beside its imposing facade, it's hard to miss the large plaque on the side of the palazzo commemorating the death of "Roberto Browning" (sic) in the building in 1889. It's a fact that also seems to be mentioned in every guide book. It's certainly the fact that was quite heavily on my mind when I first visited the palazzo in the fall of 1991. But then I'd just dropped out of an English Lit PhD program in which my dissertation was to have been on the Victorian period and, still in my mid-twenties, I was at an age when death still seems, however dark, only exotically and poetically theoretical.

Italy was vitally important to Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett, so it's certainly fitting and not at all surprising that he should be so prominently remembered here, but it's not as if to expire in Venice was the poet's last wish. He spent only a matter of months in the palazzo, which had been bought by his son and American heiress daughter-in-law, and seems to have died there only incidentally.

What surprised me just a couple of days before I finally visited Ca' Rezzonico for the second time in my life on Friday, is that Cole Porter also lived there.

Perhaps many people know this, but I don't recall seeing it in a guidebook, it's not on the Wikipedia entry for Ca' Rezzonico, nor on the website of the museum itself. I stumbled upon it while looking up something about one of Porter's songs.

According to an online chronology of Porter's life (coleportersessions.com), he rented the palazzo each summer from 1923 through the summer of 1927. According to the Wikipedia entry on Porter, he rented it for $4,000 per month ($51,000 in current value) and expanded upon the reputation he'd already made for himself in Paris of throwing the most extravagant, and scandalous, of parties.

In fact, according to some accounts, it was a scandal involving a nephew of Venice's mayor that closed Porter's run in Venice for good.

In a city that typically celebrates those celebrities who loved her, something of this sort seems to be one of the only likely explanations for the absence of any reference to Cole Porter at Ca' Rezzonico.

Too bad.

For another huge fan of Venice, Henry James, once wrote a story inspired by his personal observations of Robert Browning. The comic and slightly spooky tale is entitled "The Private Life" and focuses upon the huge yawning gulf between the brilliance of a certain great writer's work--the creations of his private self laboring alone in his room--and the numbing dullness of that writer's ordinary social self.

In the case of Cole Porter it seems as though his social self was every bit the match of the self who, when alone, wrote his songs.

I think it is these differences between the two men that explain why, as my wife Jen and I approached Ca' Rezzonico two days ago on the vaporetto, one silly question kept running through my mind:

"Would you rather visit the palazzo where Roberto Browning died or the one where Cole Porter lived?"

I was of course about to do both at the same time, but my clear preference for the latter suggested to me how much I'd changed since the last time, nearly 20 years ago, I saw Ca' Rezzonico.