This is a story about power and glory. About soldiers and ambushes-and, lest we forget, the bushes.
Yes, the classic gardens of Italy can grow juicy dirt.
“Come stand here. You must stand here,” says Count Arvedo Arvedi, 36, as he stops his carriage-a sensible Ford station wagon-just inside the driveway, climbs through the border of clipped box hedges and twisted persimmon trees, and traipses across the vast and soggy front lawn.
He stops in the middle of the property where, a few centuries ago, a path whisked visitors over the bowling green; through the iron gate in the distance; up the 20 stone steps past the life-size statues; in, around and through the winding green labyrinth; up a second flight of steps; across the prim terrace; and, finally, into the imposing villa.
We’re looking straight away at that villa right now.
The esteemed Allegri family of Northern Italy lived here (or at least on the property) for nearly 400 years, from the 15th through the 18th Centuries, defending and controlling the surrounding valley.
“You see, everything was to show power. From the first moment you arrived, you were under the control of the Allegris,” explains Arvedi, whose “grand-grand something” bought the villa in 1824.
The young count is the current, self-appointed historian of the place. He lives here with his family-all 20 or so of the Arvedi clan, Mama Alda and Papa Ottavio included; brothers Paolo and Giovanni and their wives and children included; sister Anna included; wife Carla and two young daughters Elisa and Isabella included. Everybody works here to keep the villa and its resident chicken farm, vineyard and olive press running.
None of them is noble anymore, by the way. The title just stuck, Arvedi explains. Another grand-grand relative gave back the title in 1859 to get yet another relative out of prison. It was a political thing.
But we digress.
“You see the coat of arms, the crest of Allegri is just in front of you,” continues Arvedi, a man of many words and gestures (even by Italian standards), pointing up toward the villa. “You see the shape of the property is an `A,’ because it was as if [you were] to come inside the Allegri family. . . . You see the walls of a garden [in the distance], but you don’t see the labyrinth on top. . . . You see that the statue is a soldier . . . Hercules. It’s all to tell you: `OK. I’m in control. We are the owners of the valley.”‘
What you can’t see (and neither did countless of other hapless souls) as you gaze down the bowling green is someone lurking in the 6-foot-tall boxwoods that dot the labyrinth. According to Arvedi and legend, Allegri did away with his enemies by luring them to his gracious house and then planting armed soldiers in the maze, hidden among those boxwoods. You get the picture.
Legends notwithstanding, Italy claims more than its share of drop-dead (in a good way) private gardens. Some date to the Renaissance and are amazingly intact, give or take a few blooms and busts.
That makes the ol’ giardini historically significant. But frankly, we would rather talk magic.
How can a bit of summer mist turn a line of cypress trees into an army of soldiers standing in perfect formation? How can Hercules over there by the steps show more emotion in his stone face than most living, breathing people we know? Didn’t those boxwoods, some of them 250 years old, cough up a secret or two–or was that the breeze that made their sharply clipped forms convulse?
`Bossy’ about gardens
Edith Wharton, champion of the formal Italian garden, plumbed the same mysteries nearly 100 years ago in her 1904 book-cum-travelogue “Italian Villas and Their Gardens” (Da Capo Press, $17.95):
“The traveller returning from Italy, with his eyes and imagination full of the ineffable Italian garden-magic, knows vaguely that the enchantment exists; that he has been under its spell, and that it is more potent, more enduring, more intoxicating to every sense than the most elaborate and glowing effects of modern horticulture; but he may not have found the key to the mystery,” wrote the American author. “Is it because the sky is bluer, because the vegetation is more luxuriant?”
We defer to a brassy Englishwoman.
“First of all, the Italian garden is older than any other European garden,” declares one Judith Wade Bernardi, an Italian transplant of 20 years who calls herself “a simple person” who just “goes bossy about gardens.” Three years ago, she bossed 23 elite Italian garden owners–princes and dukes among them–from Venice to Sicily to open their gardens to the public.
“This is the peculiarity of Italian gardens,” she says. “The Italians believed that man dominated nature. It was all neat and tidy. … The [formal] Italian gardens [starting from the Renaissance] were very ornate, very geometric, very architectural.”
Make them very green too.
Let the English overdo the flowers. The Italians focused on design. They steered the shadows. They calculated the minutiae–the height of a wall related to the width of a path, for instance. They considered the spit of a fountain, the silence of a dark pool. They “nipped,” as Bernardi describes the Baroque tendency, Roman statues from architectural sites and planted them in their own outbacks.
They dug deep to cultivate awe.
The young Count Arvedi, chichi loafers drunk with morning mist and lips now caressing a tiny cup of espresso, prefers to unravel Italian garden magic this way:
“The Italian garden is something not just to see. You have to read it. . . . To see is just physical. To read,” he goes on, thoughts coming faster than his English, “to read . . . is to wait . . . to understand . . . to come inside the garden not with your body . . . but your energy. It’s not so easy.”
Villa Arvedi is an easy swath of Italian countryside in which to get a lesson.
The birds are chirping. The sheep are humming. The rain has stopped. And the haze has started to lift, revealing a surround of Lessinian hills and the fact that we are standing in its valley.
This is the Veneto, the fertile countryside radiating from Venice. Villa Arvedi stands just 5 1/2 miles northeast of Verona, the other important city of the region, and smack dab in front of the one particular hill with a road running across its top, linking the valley to all that lies north.
Good geography is probably why a building has stood on this site since the 10th Century. But we can fast-forward to the end of the 14th.
That’s when the noble Allegri family acquired the property. At that point in history, the place was a quasi-fort. A small villa and a hodgepodge of houses around it gave the well-connected family both a home and a power base for controlling the valley.
The Valley Defender
By the mid-17th Century, the reigning Allegri wanted a more glorious fort. He wanted it to be a place of culture in addition to muscle.
G.B. Bianchi, a young Italian architect and sculptor, solved the paradox in 1653 with his clever design for what is now Villa Arvedi. Essentially, he revised the buildings that already existed.
He put a couple of mean-looking medieval towers (really, pigeon houses) on either side of the pretty-as-a-palace house–thus, the imposing villa. And then he laid out an interior courtyard to tie the jumble of outbuildings to the main house–thus, the gracefulness.
Inside the villa, local artisans brushed elaborate frescoes across the walls and ceilings of the most baronial halls. How better to trumpet the glory of being a rich and powerful Valley Defender?
The formal garden as it looks today came to life around 1750, a couple of Allegri-generations after the villa took form, according to Arvedi, who admits the factoid is speculation. The only documentation is a slice of boxwood that died about 10 years ago and offered up clues in its 230 rings.
But clearly, the Allegris inherited a certain like-mindedness when it came to home and garden, both of them meant to impress and control.
“It is an open garden but private at the same time,” Arvedi begins to explain. You can see all of the garden from the front gate–and none of it in much detail. Allegri pulls the strings, still.
He pulls you across the long bowling green and lands you 20 steps below the grade of the house. Eyes cock upward. Heart starts to race.
Soldiers all around
A set of jagged steps steals your breath while it takes you up to the labyrinth, the undisputed highlight and “one of the finest examples of topiary art in Italy,” says Bernardi of the meticulously clipped boxwoods that look like little mountains or giant green marshmallows, depending on your mind’s eye.
Not coincidentally, according to Arvedi, a fountain sits dead center of the labyrinth. You must cut a path close to those ominous boxwoods to get around the spitting water. Pea gravel underfoot adds a nervous crunch. Soldiers–really, statues all around–are your escorts.
Only from above–once you make it through the maze and across a small terrace that acts as a steppingstone into the villa, and you look out from a second-floor balcony–can you see that the labyrinth ironically is shaped like a gentle butterfly. Allegri again.
These days, “power” has more to do with power mowers and such.
The Arvedis employ two full-time gardeners who mow the lawn at least once a week, manicure the labyrinth, prune the laurel and persimmon trees, keep the 25 potted lemon trees blooming in an adjoining glass house and otherwise tend to the property, including yapping dachshunds and Greta the Doberman pinscher. Another four workers come on board in July or early August to give the boxwoods their annual shearing.
The primping is essential. The Arvedis did a very modern thing a couple of years ago when they started leasing out portions of their 347-year-old home to paid-for events–big corporate meetings, weddings, etc.
“The soul of the villa is still alive,” says the young Count Arvedi. “We live in a time that we don’t need to be so powerful, but the villa still has it. People come and look and say, `Wow. It is so strong.'”
IF YOU GO TO ITALY . . . HERE’S HOW TO GET INTO THE POWER GARDENS
The most difficult thing about spying some of Italy’s finest private gardens (including Villa Arvedi) may well be getting the airplane ticket abroad. This year is the Catholic Church’s Jubilee 2000 in Italy, and the tourists have cometh in throngs.
But for those who are lucky enough to get themselves round-trip tix and happen to be passionate about gardens, the green stuff is waiting for you.
So is a brassy Englishwoman.
“I am an English girl, and I represent millions and millions of tourists who would love to look behind the golden gates and look into the finest gardens of Italy,” says Judith Wade Bernardi, who has been living in Italy for the last 20 years and made her wish come true three years ago.
Bernardi convinced 23 private garden owners from Venice to Sicily–most of them fabulously wealthy; seven princes and four dukes among them–to open their gardens (and if they are so inspired, their villas and castles) to the public.
Under the auspices of her Grandi Giardini Italiani (Great Italian Gardens), garden lovers can walk the labyrinth at Villa Arvedi outside of Verona; stroll through a formal Renaissance garden in Tuscany; tiptoe through a 17th Century parterre outside Rome; roam a lush Mediterranean garden owned by a princess in Sicily; and ride in a charming horse-drawn cart through an enormous nature reserve/bird sanctuary just outside Rome.
Bernardi’s elite garden club represents 500 years of gardening history–from the Renaissance to 1960–and botanics that vary considerably from region to region.
Most of the gardens are open March through October, although some are open year-round. Appointments are necessary; often, it is the proud owners themselves who lead visitors around their property. There is a nominal entrance fee to each garden, about $5.
For more information on the Grandi Giardini Italiani and specifics on how to access each garden, check out the Web site www.thais.it/itinerari/grandigiardini. Click on the house icon. Then scroll down to “English” and click.
Or, to receive the group’s brochure, contact the Italian Government Travel Office (500 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 2240, Chicago, IL 60611; call 312-644-0996; fax 312-644-3019; e-mail enitch@italiantourism.com).
This fall, the Grandi Giardini Italiani and the European Boxwood and Topiary Society are organizing the first European Convention on Topiary Art, Oct. 14 and 15 at Villa Arvedi. The conference will be presented in English. For more information, call Bernardi’s office in Como, Italy, in the morning (there is a seven-hour time difference); dial 011-39-031-75-6211.
Count Arvedo Arvedi can be reached directly via fax at 011-39-045-908-766 or e-mail arvedi@sis.it.TheWeb site is www.villarvedi.it.
A personal note: For those who do make it to Verona or thereabouts and have a little extra cash in their pockets, we recommend hunkering down at the Due Torri Hotel Baglioni. The former 13th Century mansion has been converted into a luxurious hotel fit for–well–Mozart and Goethe. They were among the esteemed guests here. For more information, call 011-39-045-595-044; fax 011-39-045-800-4130; or e-mail duetorri.verona@baglionihotels.com.
— Karen Klages
A SUGGESTION FOR GIARDINO-HOPPING IN THE U.S.
Here’s our suggestion for garden lovers who would rather not cross the big drink but would like to experience some Italian gardens nonetheless: Buy yourself “The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Directory, 2001 Edition” (The Garden Conservancy Inc./Harry Abrams, $15.95).
The directory is a handy guide that lists hundreds of private gardens across the U.S. that are open to the public on specific weekends from March through October. The owners write mini-descriptions of their property; the words “Italian” or “Italian style” pop up all over the place–from entries in California to Connecticut.
The directory is organized by state and includes meticulous driving directions to each property as well as general information on the Open Days program. Like: Admission to each garden is $4; no reservations are required.
And so, for those who want to get a head start on planning Vacation 2001, this little book could be your lead to some fine giardini right here in the U.S.
The Garden Conservancy is a national not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of gardens. Look for the 2001 directory in bookstores or call the conservancy at 888-842-2442.
— Karen Klages
