A winged lion, symbol of Venice, greets us in the center of Asolo, the fountain still flowing with waters from a Roman aqueduct. As we park, we survey cafés bordering the irregular piazza. On the terraces, everyone seated faces the piazza. Under an awning, a group of men at tables with red-checked cloths enjoy plates of cheese and salumi. After the Veneto traffic, the narrow street into Asolo—those one-way traffic lights—and a couple of wrong turns, we could use a Campari soda ourselves. A groomed sheepdog trots smartly across the street like a politician on his way to cast the deciding vote. A woman opens her car trunk and removes an armful of white lilies. Asolare, a verb, means to “disport in the open air, amuse oneself at random.” Although coined in the fifteenth century, asolare still looks like a good thing to do in Asolo.
Even in Italy, packed with fascinating places, Asolo stands out. Only sixty kilometers from Venice, this is an appealing add-on to a visit to La Serenissima. Henry James, Carlo Scarpa, Igor Stravinsky, the Italian poet Giosuè Carducci, and many others agreed. Then there was Robert Browning. The English poet fell in love with Asolo and his last book, Asolando, published on December 12, 1889, the day he died, testifies to his feelings. Hemingway was here. Wasn’t he, like George Washington, everywhere?
Driving across the industrialized Veneto plain, you suddenly begin a bucolic climb among cypresses and verdant fields, then arrive at this intact medieval town that looks like an illustration in a book of fairy tales. There’s even a ruined thirteenth-century white castle, Il Rocco, perched above town, where a sleeping princess may lie in a glass coffin.
Maybe it was the exile here of fifteenth-century royal Caterina Cornaro, queen of Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Armenia, that put the stamp of exclusivity on Asolo. After she was forced to cede her reign to the rapacious Venetian republic, they granted her control of the town as compensation. Must have been quite a comedown but she took her position seriously and garnered an intellectual and artistic life to her provincial court. Even now that heritage endures. I have the sense that if all the cars were lifted away, we could be back with Caterina, arriving for a weekend of balls and courtly diversions.
WE CHECK INTO Albergo al Sole, small and exclusive, with a view over the town. I’m already looking forward to dining on the upstairs terrace with the moon shining down on Asolo. Our two tiny rooms are under the eaves, with two desks and an old-size double bed. I remember my freshman year in college when I had a similar room (not quite as nice) on the dorm’s fifth floor. At least there’s an elevator here. The bath is tiled in pretty, flowery green vines, a pattern someone surely would warn you against, saying that you will tire of it. Well, if you like it, you won’t.
I’M ATTRACTED TO literary quests. Asolo holds a big one for me. The attraction isn’t Browning (I barely can tolerate his poems), but one of my favorite writers, Freya Stark: travel writer, explorer, historian, archeologist, letter-writer, essayist, memoirist—yes, all of these—lived here. She died in 1993 at age one hundred, having participated to the nth in every day of the century she lived. She was first brought to Asolo as a small child in 1901, and her home, Villa Freya, was given to her by a family friend who died in 1941. The house became her touchstone during her travels in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Egypt, India, Turkey.
We set out to find it, walking along via Roberto Browning, a narrow street edged by low arcades sheltering tiny high-quality shops. There is no tourist junk on offer. Instead, we find the intimate restaurant San Daniele, and Eleonora, an enticing clothing store in a beamed and frescoed building; Gelateria Browning strikes us both as funny. There is also the tempting Galleria Asolana, whose window glitters with antique jewelry; a wine bar; and a bakery selling homemade pinza, the local traditional sweet. It’s a huge, loaf-like cake made with cornmeal, nuts, apples, raisins, and figs, without any added sugar. The owner says it’s baked in a wood oven by his mother, Graziela. We buy a wedge. At a tiny fruit and vegetable shop, we pick up a bag of cherries and walk along eating one after another, down to the bottom of the bag. Of all the seasonal fruits, cherries are my favorites. Back at Bramasole, I’ve made cherries steeped in Chianti, cherry gelato, and cherry roulade every summer for a million years but perhaps they’re best this way, bursting the plump fruit in your mouth, so sweet and juicy, tossing the pit into bushes.
“This is it,” Ed says. At the end of via Roberto Browning, where the small Zen (a family name) fountain from 1572 stands at the intersection with another road, and timed one-way signals flash, a square three-story house, peachy-gold with green shutters, stands behind a fence. Did Freya plant the hydrangeas and jasmine? Virginia creeper crawls over the façade. In fall it will turn red, not a good color for the house.
All the shutters are closed. Does the revolving desk Freya designed still overlook the back garden, where the remains of a Roman theater were found? We have the number of someone to call who can show us the interior and garden, but I don’t want to spoil this. Eudora Welty’s modest home in Jackson, Mississippi, leaves no doubt that it is authentic; even Hemingway’s house in Key West seems real. But Freya eventually sold this house, built another, and later sold that, so what can remain that is she? I am content to stand in front and imagine her joy as she welcomed friends from among her vast acquaintances, worked in her garden, set out on new quests. The surprise: Her house looks kin to my Bramasole. Three stories, like mine, square, peachy-gold, with green shutters. I’m pleased, as I feel affinity with her longing for travel, her weakness for pretty clothes, her enjoyment of picnics, her fabulous friendships, her passionate interests, and her austere let’s-keep-moving philosophy of life. Quotes of hers serve as epigraphs to several of my notebooks:
—The beckoning counts, not the clicking of the latch behind you.
—To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.
—Surely of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.
And maybe the most useful:
—One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.
WE WALK ALONG the outside walls of her garden—too tall to peek over—where an old community wash station still stands: three descending stone troughs of clear water where you can scrub, soak, then rinse. Spring-fed, or from the aqueduct? Did her maid wash the sheets here? There must have been piles of them judging from the number of guests she entertained. Farther on, we’re quickly outside town but on another narrow road where you could get your toes run over if you’re not careful. Soon there are tall iron gates, proud and dreamy villas in the distance, a realization that town is only the nucleus for life lived large on grand terms.
CARS ARE THE bane. Everyone is on their way through, it seems. Many towns in Italy have banned them from the centro. But in Asolo, where else could they go? The ways in are steep and few and the way out very narrow. There’s no level field for a parking lot. Somehow, cars are prohibited on Saturday, market day, and second Sundays, when there’s a book and antique sale in the old commercial arcade. On walks, we must flatten ourselves against a wall when a delivery truck brushes our eyelashes. Yet around the piazza, there’s little traffic.
I begin to notice that several storefronts are empty. Is Asolo losing its cachet? There are shops for shirts made to measure, but the forno is closed. Maybe it’s temporary. “No, Signora,” the waiter at the Enoteca alle Ore says, “Asolo è pieno di turisti.” Full of tourists. I don’t see them. He pours glasses of DOCG Colli Asolani/Asolo prosecco, for which the area is famed. It’s ethereal, full of pep. The chandeliers over the bar are completely romantic—drooping waterfalls of crystals shedding a golden light. Ed breaks off a hunk of pinza—moist, crumbly, tastes of figs. I think it could use a tad of sugar. (Maybe, like the Tuscan chestnut flour cake, castagnaccio, to love it, you should have been given your first slice at age two.) We buy a few bottles of prosecco to take home. We will remember, on a late summer evening, our visit to Asolo.
WHAT AN IMPOSING cathedral. “I’m churched out,” Ed says. He sits down and consults his phone messages and I wander for a few minutes. Here’s a painting of the Assumption by Lorenzo Lotto. Ed sees me standing still before it and comes to see. “The clouds around her look like clumps of popcorn.” We laugh.
“This church is really old,” I begin. “Built on the foundations of a much earlier church…”
“Let’s go,” he says.
TONIGHT AT LA Terrazza, the hotel restaurant, the moon cooperates, a waxing gibbous disappearing and appearing among high clouds. End of May and we’re alone on the dinner terrace and the dining room remains empty. Where is everyone? We pretend it’s all ours: this view, the sparkling prosecco, and the attentive service. We are overlooking the vast, sunset-colored Villa Scotti-Pasini, where Browning lived, and the Piazza Garibaldi. I’m happy with my little Parmigiano basket filled with mushrooms and fondue, Ed with his tempura scallops on a smoked pepper cream. By now Ed has looked up Browning, and quotes: “Italia’s rare/O’errunning beauty crowds the eyes…”
“Is that from Asolando?” I ask.
“Yes. ‘Crowds the eye’ is kind of a bold choice, don’t you think?”
“Sometimes you do feel that. Too much to take in. But bold is that ‘O’errunning’—sounds like the word itself is overrunning.” We’re served our secondi: Ed’s tuna in a pistachio crust, and my pork tenderloin with grilled polenta. We eat every delicious morsel. Our Browning talk fades and we turn to plans for tomorrow, lingering over coffee.
BACK IN OUR attic room, sleep won’t come. How can the shape of a room throw me back to my first months of college? How at sea I felt, seven hundred miles from the home I wanted to escape. A churning time—and now, decades later, I churn again. Nothing is ever forgotten, is it?
Beside me, Ed wakes from a nightmare: He’s in a closed car that has broken through the ice on the Mississippi and has been swept downstream under a thick layer. He wakes up. “Do you think we should have opted for the larger room?” He opens the shade that has blacked out any light and a faint glow enters.
Finally, I fall asleep.
ONLY TEN KILOMETERS away is Palladio’s Villa Barbaro, designed in 1560. Of the Palladian villas I’ve seen, this one is my favorite. Instead of the monumental perfection of Villa La Rotunda and others, Villa Barbaro invites you to imagine the actual lives of the people who built such a house, and of those who still live there. There’s a musical rhythm yet rigorous symmetry to the architecture. The residential central core, pure as a Greek temple, is flanked by long lower wings called barchesse, farming structures, which end in graceful dovecotes almost as tall as the central portion, their façades adorned with sundials. “Why such huge dovecotes?” I wonder. “Surely they didn’t roast that many pigeons?”
“Must have been for getting messages to Venice. Homing pigeons. Can’t you imagine Daniele Barbaro tying a paper to a pigeon’s leg, come for the grape harvest…”
Inside is purely glorious. Where on earth are there more charming frescoes than these of Veronese that adorn Villa Barbaro? The surprise, after all the religious art that dominates one’s Italian experience, comes from the scholarly Barbaro family, who preferred a splashy, whimsical celebration of love and harmony for their country home. Entering the villa in paper shoes to protect the floors, you’re drawn into a fantasy of muses with musical instruments, trompe-l’oeil doors opened by renderings of Barbaro family members and servants, and idyllic landscapes behind painted balustrades. Gaze and gaze on the Sala dell’Olimpo, Hall of Olympus, for it is full of flights of fancy and a joyous design of figures emanating from the philosophy of the good life. In the center of the wide coved ceiling, there’s—not the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, as I first thought—but a female representing Divine Wisdom. So that’s the center of this universe! Wisdom is surrounded by the Olympian gods and zodiacal signs. At the angles: figures representing Earth, Air, Fire, Water. Large medallions on the four sides show white, classical figures of Fortune, Fertility, Abundance, Love. (We could all do with some of these pagan values.) Below the ceiling are painted stone balconies, overlooking the room below. A parrot perches beside an elaborately dressed woman standing between a small boy and a dark-skinned wet nurse, who holds a little dog. Daniele Barbaro leans over his large hunting dog, and another Barbaro man is shown reading. There are dogs all over these frescoes, but I see only one cat. Other small details, such as a pair of slippers and a brush, add to the high-low program of these frescoes. Lesson learned: Harmony is found on both celestial and familiar levels.
There’s more. In the courtyard behind the house, the Nymphaeum, a half-moon pool of spring-fed water, backed by a stucco wall with statues installed in niches. A short distance away rises Palladio’s Tempietto, a severely classical temple that reminds me of a miniature of the Pantheon. Inside, as in his glorious church Il Redentore in Venice, the Tempietto is incandescent. The circular plan feels intimate and lofty; if you leapt, you might rise to the oculus at the center of the dome. Anyone laid to rest here will certainly ascend to heaven.
Villa Barbaro—Palladio’s last work, an embarrassment of riches, a house out of a dream, and this Tempietto, where architecture gets to embody the word holy.
AFTER A LONG pause in our room, late in the day, we venture out. We turn onto via Santa Caterina, pass the Hotel Villa Cipriani, where Freya and her friends used to dine, and continue down the hill and out of town, stopping to look at a magnificent villa and garden with a one-eyed, scraggly cat, quite out of place, and a view of another villa, so Platonically ideal it is like a cutout pasted against a hill of cypress trees. We’re looking at Villa Contarini degli Armeni, which once belonged to Armenian monks, whose order still practices book arts nearby, on the Venetian lagoon island of San Lazzaro. We pause at Villa Longobardo, hard by the road; it’s referred to in books as a palace, but it’s really quite small—and strange. On the shutters we make out zodiac symbols. Inscriptions cross the façade above the windows. The structure has nothing to do with the Longobards. One inscription on the façade includes the word longobardus, referring to Lombardia, where the architect of the house was born. The curvaceous caryatids look as if they were sculpted out of sand. Mysterious, weird. Inside, a wizard might be mixing alchemical concoctions.
We are walking to the hillside Cimitero di Asolo at Sant’Anna, where Freya is buried. We see the grave of the Italian actress Eleonora Duse first. Just her name and dates. Someone has left primroses. A lizard suns on the stone. All quiet now, but what wild times she must have had with her lover, the flamboyant proto-fascist poet and World War One hero, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who changed the flowers around his bed three times a day.
We don’t find Freya. We stumble upon some startling room-size mausoleums in the fascist rationalist style, but most of our discoveries are just plain graves decorated with photos of the occupant and many flowers. A woman has brought gardening gloves, clippers, and new plants. She’s ripping out the winter dead. There!—Freya lies just a few feet from Eleonora. Her blindingly white stone says “1893–1993.” And below her name, simply “Writer & Traveller.” There’s another name on the stone: Herbert Hammerton Young, died 1941. He was the great family friend who gave Freya her villa. I should have brought flowers; she has none.
WE COLLECT OUR luggage and load the car. In the market there are no flowers but I buy a healthy basil plant in a plastic pot. I’m sure Freya knew the Keats poem “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil.” Driving out of town, we stop again at the cemetery. I leave the basil on Freya’s stone. I hope someone will water it.
NOTES:
Freya Stark’s villa: Later, after coming upon an article by Kristian Buziol, who restored Freya’s garden, I regret not seeing it. A visit can be arranged through BellAsolo Tours in Asolo. www.bellasolo.it.
Two excellent videos on Palladio’s Villa Barbaro and the Tempietto:
Visiting Villa Barbaro reminded me of Sally Gable’s Palladian Days: Finding a New Life in a Venetian Country House. Said house is Palladio’s Villa Cornaro. This is a moving text describing the joys and foibles of taking on a piece of the world patrimony.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio—Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War informs, amuses, and repels in equal parts. D’Annunzio was a prolific writer, a war hero, and a fascinating player in the history of fascism. Writing in Atlas Obscura, Romie Stott claims that D’Annunzio, being bored with bourgeois democracy and wanting more romanticism, “invented fascism as an art project.” An egomaniac and an influential writer, he thought the business of the state should be music. D’Annunzio’s novel The Flame of Life (Il fuoco, 1900) is a fictionalized story of his affair with Eleonora Duse.