Staying at the Villa Saraceno

[shewhomust]

Sometimes writing about things for these posts makes me see them in a new light. Moving from recent Fair Isle posts to plan this one made me realise what a complete contrast there was between my accommodation on these two successive holidays: from a lighthouse on the windy tip of a remote island to a Palladian villa in the flatlands of the Veneto. When D. first outlined his plans for his birthday celebrations, he told us "You won't find much of interest in the area, it's just agricultural land in the plains, nothing to see, but the villa will be a pleasant place to be and socialise or read..." He was wrong about the first half of that, but right about the second.

I'd met the expression 'Palladian' and had a vague idea of the sort of neoclassical architecture it described; a week at the Villa Saraceno was a crash course in what those words mean (it also gave me the same sensation of being out of my depth that you get when you've rather liked a book or a piece of music, and find yourself among true fans of its creator). Saraceno isn't large, as Palladian villas go, and only the central block was completed within Palladio's lifetime (the colonnaded barchessa to the right is nineteenth century, and in the original plan was mirrored by another to the left of the central block); the medieval farmhouse which it was to replace survives, fading into the darkness in the photo. But it's in the guidebooks, and collectors of Palladian vllas come and gaze through the gates (and visit on Wednesday afternoons, when parts of it are open to the public); it is a World Heritage site (or part of one). And we got to stay there - and to switch on the floodlighting, if we felt like it.

durham_rambler and I were given the tour as soon as we arrived, still shell-shocked from the drive. Necessarily, because how could we relax and recover until we'd chosen our bedroom? But I didn't get much grasp of the layout of the house until later. It took me a couple of days to stop walking out of the sitting room into D. and valydiarosada's bedroom, when I was aiming for the staircase up to our own room. And I never really came to know the 'casa vecchia', the medieval house.

We turned down a palatial bedroom, with plenty of space and a writing table and a double bed, but a very worn flight of stairs away from its bathroom, in favour of a smaller room with twin beds (but what charming twin beds) across a tiled landing from a bathroom which - though this was just luck - was much envied for having both bath and shower (I didn't count, but think there must have been a bathroom for each room, though in practice we were flexible about sharing facilities. The nights were so hot that I didn't regret the twin beds, either.

I had been apprehensive about the heat of an Italian August (and on the plain, not in the hills): I'm a northerner by choice. But the villa was designed to make the climate bearable. The centre of the main block was one large room, the 'sala' running the full width of the house, with high doors front and back (and, I think, the full height, too) which stood open through the day to catch each breath of air and encourage it to blow through the rooms off the sala to either side. I felt miniaturised in this great frescoed space: a child, a doll, a mouse scurrying across the tiles, admiring the room but not at ease there, heading for the comfort of the sitting room, similarly splendidly decorated (frescoes! a chandelier!) but furnished for real people to relax in.

There were any number of pleasant places to spend time. There was a long table under the shade of the barchessa, where I liked to eat my breakfast - and it was a pleasure, too, to return from a day's excursions and find others sitting there, opening bottles for a comparative wine tasting. There were wooden benches under the loggia, another restful place to shelter from the sun - although in fact I didn't discover it until a day of torrential rain, when it offered a different kind of shelter.

All this grandeur coexisted with reminders that the property was originally a farm house. The back door opened onto a meadow (originally an orchard), separated from the fields beyond by a drainage ditch and a few trees; in front there was a walled garden, but across the road were fields of maize, and when the farmer was spreading manure fertilizer, the house was filled with the scent of it. The agricultural history of the building was visible, too, in one of my favourite spaces, the long granary above the barchessa. We never really put this play area to use, though a couple of sets of eight could have danced there with no more than reasonable care. I kept opening the door and looking down its cool perspective, just for the pleasure of it.

There's more to tell: the morning we found a family of swallows had settled on the shutters of one of the windows; the day it rained, and we discovered that instead of downpipes the gutters fed into waterspouts which poured the torrential rain away from the house in great arcs; the 'other villa Saraceno' built in the traditional style just down the road, for the brother of the owner of 'our' villa - and these are just my highlights. I suspect that any other member of the party would give a different narrative of our week at the villa.

All the photographs

The Landmark Trust

Comments

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

::swoons for the frescoes::

What did the watermelon say? It was hard to read from the photo.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

It was a birthday message: I can still make out 'Bonne anniversaire' but some of the ink had rubbed off by the time I took the picture.

We were just feeling triumphant at having eaten the whole of one giant watermelon when some new people arrived, bringing this birthday melon with them.

[cellio]

That looks and sounds like a lot of fun!

[anef.livejournal.com]

That looks totally fabulous. I had seen it in the Landmark Trust brochure, and wondered if it would be as excellent as it looked, but evidently yes.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, it ws!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Indeed. In fact, even better than it looks, because the surrounding area has so much to offer - I'll get to that later.

Meanwhile, have fun in Provence!

[anef.livejournal.com]

Thank you, we intend to. Lots of Roman ruins, interspersed with shopping, visiting charmng Provencal restaurants, drinking French wines and reading. Oh, and La Marquise has found a chateau somewhere to visit.