A Year in the World (48 page)

When I asked my friend Fulvio where he thought the ideal place to live might be, he said, “Nowhere, close to somewhere.” A wonderful answer. But these magnetic small Italian cities may be even better because they offer a grounded sense of community, which seems to me more and more desirable in a tilting world. I would prefer to have several lives.

Ed stirs in his sleep. “
Much Ado about Nothing
,” he says, “and
All’s Well That Ends Well
. I think there’s one more. He should have come here.”

“Right. Good. I can’t sleep. He should have written one called
Buona Notte
.”

Washed
by the rain, Mantova looks splendid in the morning sun. No wonder the Gonzaga boys loved the sun so much in this place of winter mists and summer humidity. In earlier centuries a rain cloak was called a mantua. The city has been misty since the first Gonzaga rode into town. This morning the air sparkles like the local Franciacorta wine. We will devote the day to the Gonzaga, but first a chocolate
cornetto
at our bar, at our table by the lace-curtained window. I see the waiter from last night ride by on a bicycle. Grabbing the moment, cafés all over town are setting up outdoor tables and washing the sidewalks under the arcades. Mantova has the most good-looking men I have ever seen in one place. Fine features, alluring eyes, slight and tall, black, black hair.

I wish we did not have to see the Palazzo Ducale in a group. What a thrill it would be to roam at will through the five hundred rooms, the dusty unrestored ones as well as the famous ones. We are lucky that our group numbers only six, plus the guide who simply announces where we are, as we go, and offers a few remarks. The major art here, Mantegna’s
La Camera degli Sposi,
the Married Couple’s Room, dominates the attention of art historians. If it were not here, the sequence of other utterly stupendous rooms would be joy enough. The apartments of the Gonzaga family, spanning several generations, attest to their exuberant love of art and to their own personal lives. The frieze of children and dogs playing, the faces in the portrait room, the hand holding a letter and another reaching down to pet a dog while something auspicious is happening in the rest of the painting, the painted frames at child height of rabbits and birds, the many, many horses so loved by the Gonzaga, the dog resting under a chair, the child holding an apple—so many of these details bring the cold fortress rooms close and say to the viewer,
We were here
. There are dogs everywhere; even their rear ends with dangling balls are rendered precisely.

Pisanello worked here prior to Mantegna. His large sinopie—the artist’s design under a fresco—remain. Seeing his terra-cotta and black underpinning is like glimpsing someone in their underwear—possibly shocking and very revealing. When the Gonzaga fell on hard times, most of the incredible collection of art was sold. What paintings—not frescoes—remain have migrated back there over the years. One painting of the family adoring the trinity by Raphael was cut into bits by marauding soldiers and has been patched together again.

We pass through long galleries of dark paintings. We both stop to examine Karl Santner’s
Annunciation
, with a companion painting of the angel from 1630. The Virgin’s basket of sewing and scissors sits at her feet. The angel carries a big lily you almost can smell. Santner was probably a Bavarian monk, one of many artists invited to create this city.

I lag behind in the music room, where Apollo pulls the chariot of dawn across the ceiling. This room feels different, with long windows on one side, mirrors on the other. The guide says it started as a lodge. Eventually the Austrians remodeled it; hence the gilt. What attracts me are the painted allegories of eloquence, kindness, immortality, intellect, magnanimity, affability, and generosity. In another space: harmony, humility, magnificence. On the southern side: innocence, happiness, philosophy. Where is my group? Which way to go? Lost in Gonzagaland.

What life among all these riotous walls and ceilings! I wish I could photograph the painted borders around doors, one after another, lovely foliage and flower designs, fake marble, grotesques. One room has eight panels of decoration around the doors, each six or so inches to a foot wide, like the borders in an intricate rug. The vast painting of the Judith legend must have scared the tunics off the Gonzaga tots. Seen through heavy brown tents, the ugly scene plays out, brooding across the wall to the head of Holofernes on a stick. One of the best rooms has a lapis-blue ceiling painted with the fabled zodiac figures connecting the stars.

The family loved labyrinths, possibly because they lived in one. The boxed coffers of a remarkable green and gold boxed ceiling form a labyrinth. It makes me want to lie on the floor and trace the route to the center. The words
forse che sì, forse che no
, perhaps yes, perhaps no, repeat along all the paths. In another room we see a startling painting of Mount Olympus rising from a water labyrinth, with boats in the circular lanes of the water. Fantasy all over the place. Startling—what will ambush you in the next
sala
?

When we finally reach
La Camera degli Sposi
, the room is full of children on portable seats, listening to the teacher. I hear a skinny boy say
che bella
, how beautiful. I’d expected the room to be bigger. Instead, the intimate scale intensifies Mantegna’s experiment with reality and illusion. The children fold their seats and move on. The celebrated Gonzaga family group, arranged above the mantel, causes the odd effect of making the mantel appear to be painted, too. The Oriental rug under them drapes down the wall beside the fireplace, a fantastic touch that stabilizes the vision of them on another tier of the room. Though the sections suggest narrative, no one knows whether the painting commemorates an occasion or was just an ambitious, extended portrait of the family and court life. After the completion of the work, the Gonzaga children were brought into the room and shown to visitors so Mantegna’s skill could be appreciated. The wonderful faces
are
realistic, but more goes on than depiction. Rich draperies appear to be flung aside so that we can view the Gonzagas. I imagine Mantegna decided that he was going to have some fun as long as he was spending over ten years closed up in that tiny room. The background landscapes, classical ruins, intricate details of farming and daily life, luscious fabrics, borders (where the artist included a small self-portrait), putti with butterfly wings, and most of all the oculus in the center of the ceiling give him room to dream and play. The oculus seems to be his big joke. He pulls out all the stops with perspective and foreshortening as he allows women, roly-poly putti, and a peacock to stare down into the room from the seemingly open dome. A wooden bar painted across an edge of the dome supports a pot of lemons—a fantastic trompe l’oeil detail. One of the women is Moorish in a striped turban; the three looking down on the Gonzaga spectacle below have enigmatic expressions on their faces.

We are allowed to linger. The sign says groups are limited to five minutes, which is absurd. A pleasure of late November travel.

Let out into the light of day, we are dazed. What rambunctious art—pagan and secular! Strenuous gods galloping their chariots and feasting among satyrs and buxom mortal nudes. Not a moment of piety, no cycle of a saint’s miracles and tribulations, nary a Madonna.

We seek refuge at an
osteria
off the old piazza of Matilde Canossa, who ruled before the Gonzaga group. The iron kiosk for newspapers and the intimate chapel for the Madonna of the Earthquake are situated in the piazza, not far from movie posters for my friend Audrey Wells’s new film. We take a picture to send her of the magnified face of Richard Gere looking out toward the rusticated stone palazzo of the warring Matilde.

I order shrimp with carrot velouté, which I don’t like, and Ed has a selection of
salume
served on a piece of butcher’s paper, with dabs of chestnut honey and apple
mostarda
. Then we choose tagliatelle with quail, the boned stuffed rabbit, and a glass of merlot from Lake Garda. We split a piece of the local
sbrisolona
served with a dish of cherry preserves. In Turkey we loved all the “spoon” tastes like this, fruit condiments served with tea and desserts. As with many cherished Italian desserts, the famous cake does not enchant me. The dryness seems deeply
wrong
to one raised on coconut cake, pecan pie, and chocolate icebox cake. Ed likes it. He likes most desserts. The man we pay, who walks us to the door, is stop-traffic gorgeous. He’s more handsome than any Gonzaga face Mantegna captured. He smiles like a flood of sunlight, and if I were twenty-five and single, I would be coming back tonight for dinner. As it is, I say to Ed, “His mother must be so proud of him.” All the beautiful men of Mantova are reincarnations of Romeo sent to grace the city. Longing for him, Juliet said:

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night

Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

In high school I memorized many parts of the play and have them with me this afternoon in Mantova.

We make it back to the hotel for a long pause with the books we’ve accumulated since we’ve been here. So frequently when I travel, I have to rest to absorb all I’ve seen before I can go on. The local books help, providing context, facts, and places not found in guidebooks, and always maps, which we both pore over, imagining how the city works.

One of those books,
A tavola con gli Dei
, contains antique recipes of the Gonzaga court with illustrations from psalters and manuscripts: a pig about to be slaughtered, a boar among flowers, a woman gathering honey from hives under a charming pergola, a sheet of music decorated with an artichoke, a bird, and a moth. I read about almond confiture,
offelle
, little cakes made of two disks and filled with marmalade or marzipan. This is how the nuns make biscotti: cook them in a slow oven, and halfway through, sprinkle them with sugar. Still good advice. For
Pesce in Agrodolce
, sweet and sour fish, you’re told to mix strong vinegar with sugar and boil it with good olive oil to dissolve the sugar, then to add sweet spices (unspecified), laurel leaves, and pepper. This and the fish go into a little barrel for pickling. Since
polpettoni
, meatballs, are one of my favorite Tuscan dishes, I’m interested to read a 1714 recipe that calls for adding eggs “conforming to the quantity of the meat” and seasonings of cheese, pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg, all well incorporated. If you cook this slowly in broth, you will have a dinner
“stupendissimo.”
Other recipes call for saffron, vanilla, ginger, cloves (a quite rare spice at that time),
caxo
, which I take to mean ground chocolate, and—what’s this—
nitro
, also listed as
salnitro
, nitrate salt. Olive oil is recommended in
buona quantità
, a given throughout Italy forever. In 1519 Isabelle d’Este wrote from Mantova to her brother the Duke of Ferrara her recipe for cabbage, and suddenly I imagine the smell drifting through the palace’s zodiac room, the garden room of the river gods, and into the quarters of the court dwarf. (If only her memoirs would surface in some remote
armadio
.) The aromas and imagined tastes of food reach across centuries. The duke opens the letter. He instructs the cook. But isn’t his sister’s recipe rather plain, cabbage just boiled until tender and dressed with oil and vinegar? “Add some garlic,” he tells the cook, “and some of the little raisins soaked in wine, and a few sliced eggs on top.”

We emerge for a late dinner on the Piazza Erbe and eat only pasta with white truffles, ’tis the season, and salad. Tonight I sleep and have one of those single-image dreams that happen often when I travel: in a large glass of water, a pink flower is submerged. The dream seems heraldic. Is it Mantova in the world?

The
other Gonzaga residence, Palazzo Te, is in every way the flip side of the Palazzo Ducale. Built by Federico II right where town now turns to country, the palazzo sings an ode to pleasure and light; the fortress mentality was left on the doorstep of the Palazzo Ducale. Palazzo Te, no longer surrounded by water as it once was, still invokes a sense of leisure and plein air. Here Federico cavorted with his mistress and enjoyed the life-size portraits of his best horses that ring a large entrance hall. Mixed with friezes and niches of putti and pagan gods, the horses are plain outrageous. You can’t help but laugh. I imagine the place was thought to be in quite bad taste back in the sixteenth century; the patina of time allows a suspension of judgment. In a room with salamanders depicted on panels, we read Federico’s lament:
ciò che a lui manca, tormenta me
. The cold-blooded salamander lacks passion: “what he lacks torments me.” Perhaps Federico identified most with the room of Cupid and Psyche and the banquet celebrated with the gods. In one scene a naked, semi-reclining woman with her left leg hiked about a robust man might have personified his sexual torment. The man, who unfortunately tapers into a merman with a seahorse-type tail, has an erection that puts to shame the poor pornographic paintings of Pompeii or Mapplethorpe photographs of black studs. He is aiming straight between her legs. Perhaps this was a very private chamber.

We cross a grand external loggia between garden and courtyard. The palazzo’s endless rooms, each with its theme—eagles, falcons, zodiac, emperors—somehow still form a contained villa. We leave with a sense of lived life and a bit of sympathy for the hot-blooded Federico.

The walk back to town takes us past the house of Mantegna, which looks something like a shoe factory. Just a square brick building with plain windows. The inside opens to a round courtyard. The ambience suggests Mantegna’s sense of privacy. From the street, nothing is given away, nothing is suggested. We stop at a
gastronomia
with open crocks of
mostarde
—orange, fig, pear, vegetables, cherry,
cedro
(those oversize strange citruses), apricots, so many. Ed buys several to take home—pumpkin and apple, the pear, the plain apple, and the grape.