Palladian Days Read Online Free Page A

amuses himself by examining the statues, painted ceilings, chandeliers, and frescos that surround him, and by turning the pages of a newly published German book with the south facade of Villa Cornaro featured on the cover.
    Miraculously, after several hours of wordsmithing, Carl and Dick sign the contract. Within a month, Villa Cornaro is ours. Of course, whether it will remain ours depends on whether the Italian government chooses to buy it away in the ensuing sixty days.
    For the next two months my mind is filled with two fears: fearthat the government will whisk our new treasure away from us, and fear that it will not. My first fear is of losing an unexplored new life in Italy; my second is of becoming saddled with a 435-year-old white elephant pastured four thousand miles away.

    The formal garden, looking north
    Sometimes my mind retrieves the image of that first time we saw Villa Cornaro—our London friends and us parking in Piazzetta Squizzato, getting out of the car to stare across Via Roma. For us those first steps through the gate and into the boxwood garden were like those that Mary Lennox took so innocently into her own “Secret Garden.” Ordinary steps, it would seem, but life-changing. Through all the visits, conferences, false starts, demands, and concessions, each step seemed tentative and revocable. Yet in retrospect, I cannot imagine the consequences of having taken a different course at any stage. From those first steps, everything moved with an inexorable force of its own.

5
Villa Cornaro ora Gable
    We fly into the Treviso airport on a brilliant October morning— Carl and I and our daughter, Ashley, who is vacationing from her job as a paralegal in Washington, D.C.
    Throughout the flight, my elation at beginning our great Italian adventure has wrestled with my fears. Carl has been a disappointment: I usually rely on him as my risk assessor, but he has slept contentedly all across the Atlantic and really didn't seem all that awake when we changed planes in Frankfurt. So I'm left to handle the worrying by myself.
    What if we hate Italy?
Impossible
.
    What if no one in town can understand our newly tutored Italian?
Possible; maybe curable with time
.
    What if they understand us but don't like us?
We can work on that, too, I suppose
.
    What if the expense of maintaining the villa outruns our bank account?
Unknown risk
.
    What if we're kidnapped! I shake Carl awake. This is too much worry for me to be stuck with alone.
    But before I can alarm Carl, our plane leaves the murky cloud cover over Germany and I watch the snowy Alps rising beneath us like a vast white-spumed sea. Then the crested waves subside and we soar out over the glistening Venetan plain.
    “Buon giorno! Benarrivati!”
Dick Rush, tall and thin as ever and remarkably unconcerned about his dignity, hails us excitedly as we hurry past the somnolent customs inspectors. His enthusiasm is genuine, though his Italian accent is suspect. His eagerness to emulate the renowned Italian hospitality, evident in his big grin and gesticulations, reminds me of my beloved black labrador Cleo greeting me when I've returned home. Waving his arms like a juggler, Dick chats nonstop of his pleasure in welcoming us to Italy, ofhow he and Julie have prepared the villa for us with fresh touch-up paint and new wax, and of the dozens of people coming to a reception in our honor on Saturday afternoon—for we are arriving at Piombino Dese as the new owners of its Palladian villa! As a newspaper of the province headlines its brief article on the event:
    Villa “Rush”

ora e “Gable”
    Villa “Rush”
now is “Gable”
    Dick is accompanied by Giacomo Miolo, who is driving a second car to accommodate all our luggage. It's our first meeting with Giacomo—in fact, the first time we have ever heard his name. His stocky frame and dark, handsome face contrast dramatically with Dick's tall, pale appearance. I defensively assume that Giacomo's silence, baldly highlighted