On the Shores of the Mediterranean. Eric Newby

whom they all called by his first name. Uniformly well-formed, longhaired, long-legged, the sort of girls who can wear flat heels and still look as if they are wearing high heels, not particularly beautiful but so well-groomed that most men would not notice the fact, the product of female emancipation in post-war Italy where, until well into the sixties, girls stayed at home with their mothers in the evening, were chaperoned if they went out, and it was exceptional to find one who could drive a car. These girls looked not only as if they drove cars, but drove fast ones.

      They did not look like typical Venetians, although, like the men, they interpolated whole paragraphs in Venetian dialect into their conversation, that strange amalgam which has strains of French, Arabic and Greek overlaying the Italian, blurring and contracting it. Perhaps girls do not become typical Venetians until they become older. Their mothers would look as Venetian as the men they were drinking with; their grandmothers would be the dies from which typical Venetians are pressed. These girls just looked like girls. Whether they were well-off or not, they were giving a convincing display of being so. It was difficult to imagine a band of such overtly conspicuous consumers, dressed like this and loaded with expensive ephemera, sallying out into the fog from some drinking place in SW1 and walking home without being mugged, for this is what they were going to have to do when they did leave, in a city without motor cars, that is unless they slept over the premises or had bodyguards waiting for them.

      One of the girls, who was wearing a Loden cape, announced that she had just inherited an eighteenth-century villa, in the country somewhere west of Treviso, destroying, in her case, the theory that she might be either daughter or mistress – perhaps they were assistants to the shopkeepers. Apparently it was in a very bad condition, having been used as a farmhouse for more than fifty years.

      ‘What should I do with it?’ she asked. ‘It could be very beautiful.’

      ‘I would insure it for a lot of money,’ one of the men said. ‘Say four hundred and fifty milioni [about £190,000 or $266,000]. And then I would pay someone to burn it down.’ It was difficult to know if he was joking.

      The villa she was talking about was one of the country houses to which rich Venetians, Trevisans, Paduans and Vicenzans used to escape from the heat and stench of their cities in summer and in the autumn. They began building them in earnest in the sixteenth century, although some date from as early as the fourteenth century, and they built them in the plain between the foothills of the Alps and the lagoons. They continued to build them far into the eighteenth century, by which time they had become almost symbolic of the frivolity and lack of energy for commerce which characterized the last years of the Republic. They lined the banks of the Brenta Canal between Mestre and Padua with them, making of it a watery triumphal way. The best known is the mysterious and withdrawn Villa Malcontenta, one of the masterpieces of Palladio – 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