“The servants were devoted to my parents,” she said. “Rosa would always insist on waiting up for my mother and father when they dined out. She withheld the house keys from them, offering the excuse that they were far too big and heavy to be tucked into the pocket of a gentleman’s dinner jacket. And when my parents returned home, she would insist on serving them hot lemonade.
“During World War II, the Italian government sequestered the Barbaro, and as ‘enemy aliens’ we were not permitted to live here. But Rosa and Angelo stayed in the palace and looked after it faithfully. We were in Paris when the war broke out, and my father decided to take us directly to New York. We didn’t know if we’d ever see the Barbaro again. The Venetian superintendents came, crated the art, and took it to the Doge’s Palace, where it would be safe. The Japanese military attaché used the piano nobile for a headquarters and covered the dining room walls with framed photographs of Japanese war planes in action—including kamikaze planes. But Rosa cleverly hid the silver and other valuables, and Angelo sealed off the entrance to the library on the top floor so convincingly that people who occupied the Barbaro during the war never even knew the room existed.
“When my parents came back to Venice after the war, Rosa proudly took them around the palace to show them that everything had been returned to its prewar condition. She had even taken the photographs of the Japanese warplanes off the dining room walls and stacked them away.”
We left the ballroom through an enfilade of doorways into the master bedroom suite on the corner. These were the royal chambers, majestic in scale and prospect: two tall, balconied windows on the Grand Canal; side windows looking out over a narrow rio along the side of the palace; brocaded walls, and furniture from the time of the Barbaros.
Before I left, Patricia took me through her own apartment one floor above—the apartment that would still be hers even after the piano nobile had been sold. It had the same floor plan as the piano nobile, minus the ballroom, which gave it a broad, sunny central hall with spacious rooms on both sides and, in all, eight windows on the Grand Canal. The ceilings were lower, the walls were decorated with simple but elegant moldings, and yet by any standard, even for Venice, this was a superb apartment.
At one point, we walked into one of the guest bedrooms, and I became aware that Patricia was watching me for my reaction, now more than before. And immediately I saw why.
On the wall in front of us there was a full-length portrait of a young woman in a strapless white gown. The pose was the first thing that drew my attention. It was almost identical to the exuberant pose of Isabella Stewart Gardner in the famous portrait of her, painted at the Barbaro by Anders Zorn: arms outstretched to the sides as she pushed open a pair of double doors and came sweeping into the salone from one of the balconies on the Grand Canal. The brushwork in the painting was reminiscent of Sargent’s style. I was fairly certain this was the portrait that Ralph had mentioned to me.
“Is that you?” I asked.
“Yes. I was wearing my debutante dress.”
“And who painted it?”
“A man named Charles Merrill Mount,” she said. “Do you know him?”
Charles Merrill Mount was a name I did know. For years he had been a prominent Sargent specialist. He had written a biography of Sargent, and his expert opinion was often sought for the authentication of paintings thought to be by Sargent—that is, until it was discovered that he was authenticating Sargents that he himself had painted.
“You mean the Charles Merrill Mount who went to jail?” I said.
“Yes.”
I said that I thought it was pretty impressive to have a portrait of oneself painted by a master forger of Sargent paintings, based on a portrait by Anders Zorn, painted in the same place Zorn had painted his original. As I looked at the portrait, it occurred to me that Charles Merrill Mount had captured Patricia in more than one sense. He had pulled her into the artistic history of the house, back into the late nineteenth century, to the era of Sargent, Henry James, and Isabella Stewart Gardner. I could only guess how strongly she identified with that glorious past through this painting—and whether the white dress had anything to do with her always wearing white.
“There’s another room on this floor that I think might interest you,” she said.
She opened the door to a long, narrow room with a low, vaulted ceiling. Bookcases lined the walls, and between them on three sides rays of sunlight streamed in and fell in pools of amber on the terrazzo floor. Much older and far more decorative than the rest of her apartment, this library was like a slice carved out of the piano nobile and brought up here for safekeeping. This was the room that the servant Angelo had sealed off during the Second World War so that nobody who lived in the palace knew it was there. It was a gem of a room, and it would still be hers even when the piano nobile was not. No two-to-one vote could take it away.
“One summer,” she said, “when Isabella Stewart Gardner rented the palace from my great-grandparents, she had a houseful of guests, including Henry James, and she ran out of bedrooms. So she put an extra bed up here for James. He loved gazing up at the stucco and the paintings on the ceiling, and he wrote my great-grandmother a letter about it to tell her what she, the owner of the palace, had been missing if she hadn’t slept in this room herself.”
She lifted a piece of paper out of a book and read:“‘Have you ever lived here?—if you haven’t, if you haven’t gazed upward from your couch, in the rosy dawn, or during the postprandial (that is after-luncheon) siesta, at the medallions and arabesques of the ceiling, permit me to say that you don’t know the Barbaro.’”
She slipped the letter back into the book.
“When I was fourteen, my father called us up here after school was finished for the semester—he sat at that desk over there—and handed out books he wanted us to read over the summer. He gave me The Wings of the Dove.”
“You were fourteen?”
“I’ll admit I found it difficult, but, having read it, I can understand why, for some people, no matter who owns the Barbaro, it will always belong to Milly Theale. In fact,” she said as we started back downstairs, “Milly Theale will be returning to the Barbaro in a few months.”
“How so?” I asked.
“An English film company is coming to make the movie of The Wings of the Dove.”
Patricia’s mood seemed to brighten at the rightness of it. The Curtises had allowed footage for a dozen or more films to be shot inside the Barbaro, films that had no connection at all with the Barbaro. It seemed fitting that this one, which had everything to do with the Barbaro and the Curtises, would be the last under the ownership of the Curtis family.
I recalled a bit of dialogue from the book that made it all the more poignant, and I wondered if the thought had occurred to Patricia as well: Milly has moved into “Palazzo Leporelli” and has fallen in love with it. She clings to it, never wants to leave. She tells Lord Mark, “I go about here. I don’t get tired of it. I never should—it suits me so. I adore the place. . . . I don’t want in the least to give it up.”
“. . . Should you positively like to live here?”
“I think I should like,” said poor Milly after an instant, “to die here.”
“I’VE SEEN MANY ACTORS, many directors, many film crews come to this house to make movies,” said Daniel Curtis, the son of Patricia and the namesake and great-great-grandson of the Daniel Sargent Curtis who bought Palazzo Barbaro in 1885, “and every time it’s been like being, not exactly stabbed in the back, but scratched badly.”
I had met Daniel Curtis for the first time outside the Barbaro during the filming of The Wings of the Dove. Tall, lean, and with a head of dark, curly hair, he was about forty years old and possessed of abundant charm and good looks, for which he had become celebrated in Venice.
“Because it’s either a piece of duct tape on the terrazzo—you know that when they pull it up afterwards the whole bloody thing comes off, and it needs another twenty years of wax to make
it as it was before—or it’s something even more calamitous, as happened last year when a scene was being filmed here for In Love and War. A technician walked into the salone with a ladder over his shoulder and slammed the end of it into an eighteenth-century chandelier. Then, at the sound of the crash, he turned around to see what damage he had done and swung it into a second chandelier. I tell you from my heart, when something like that happens, it is, to me, like a rape of the house.”
The cast and crew of The Wings of the Dove came to Palazzo Barbaro, made their movie, and left. Crowds watched from the Accademia Bridge and Campo San Vio, fascinated as two mist-making machines on boats moored in the Grand Canal turned a sunny summer day into a drizzly winter afternoon and as a cherry picker mounted on a barge lifted a cameraman high in the air to shoot a scene with Milly Theale and Kate Croy (played by Alison Elliott and Helena Bonham Carter) looking out from a balcony on the piano nobile. The director of photography used coral filters to give the scenes shot in Venice a warm golden glow, in contrast to the London scenes, which were shot with a cold blue motif. Inside the Barbaro, set designers draped bolts of dark velvet with gold threads over the furniture to create the chiaroscuro effect of a Sargent painting. In two months of shooting, the film crew caused no more harm to the Barbaro than the usual wear and tear, and advance word had it that the movie was very good.
When the filming was over, prospective buyers once again trooped through the palace, taking the measure of the piano nobile. Jim Sherwood was one of them. In addition to owning ‘21’ and the Cipriani, Sherwood was the proprietor of a luxury empire that included the Orient-Express Railroad and a worldwide chain of thirty deluxe hotels. Sherwood’s catered dinners at the Barbaro had long since come to an end when he received a call from Patricia.
“Patricia asked me if I had any interest in buying the piano nobile, ” Sherwood told me one afternoon as we sat on the terrace of the Cipriani. “I wanted to go over and have a close look at it, but she was out of town, so I had to ask Ralph to take me through instead. Patricia warned me he’d object to the idea. I received a letter from him enclosing a form that I was supposed to sign with a print of the big toe of my right foot. The return address was ‘Mission Control, Spaceship Barbaro.’ I ignored it, and a few days later a second letter arrived in an envelope covered with blood. The message said, in effect, ‘Well, even though you haven’t given us an imprint of your toe, you can come and look at the property.’ He was pleasant enough when we met with him.
“My thought was that we might create apartments on the piano nobile and advertise them as ‘A Night in a Venetian Palazzo on the Grand Canal.’ It would have been the only accommodation like it in Venice. I had a study done and found we could make six apartments, but with the asking price and the vast expense of restoration and repair, I concluded it wouldn’t pay off.”
Finally a buyer emerged in the person of Ivano Beggio, the owner of Aprilia, the second-largest maker of motorcycles in Europe. “Ivano Beggio is the new spiritual custodian of Palazzo Barbaro,” crowed Ralph Curtis. Patricia was depressed. Daniel was angry.
After the Beggio deal was done, I encountered Daniel again as he was walking over the Accademia Bridge with his girlfriend. He invited me to join them in his apartment in the Barbaro for a glass of wine.
High up in the baroque side of the palace, the apartment had windows running the length of its western wall, admitting a bright, warm afternoon sun. Daniel poured two glasses of white wine while his girlfriend made a cup of tea for herself.
“When the piano nobile was sold,” he said, “I tell you, I felt so bad. Because I grew up in this house. It was at a time when we still had gondoliers and when my grandfather was still alive. Sometimes I dream of the cuddles and the love that my grandfather transmitted to me when I was six, seven, eight years old, because I still carry them inside me, together with the smell of whiskey that always came out with his words as he was telling me enchanting stories at night about fishermen and sailors.”
Daniel spoke fluent, heavily accented English. His father, a Venetian named Gianni Pellegrini, was Patricia Curtis’s first husband; they were divorced when Daniel was four. Daniel often used the surname Curtis.
“When I was a teenager, I used to lie on the floor of the salone and look at the plaster figures on the ceiling, the stucchi. If I looked long enough, faces and masks would begin to emerge, sometimes ugly, sometimes smiling, but always fantastic and always in the same corner, particularly with the change of light, because the salone was filled with light.
“But best of all, when I was eighteen, I had the palace all to myself. My stepfather was very busy setting up a new business in Malaysia, so my mother had to go there frequently, and when she was away, I had the run of the palace. The maids cooked my meals, and there was a majordomo living downstairs who was always drunk. He was called Giovanni, and he had a great many bottles of wine under his bed. As you can imagine, I had a lot of girlfriends who were attracted by the big house, and I became a bit of a play-boy in those days.”
Just as Venetians had considered his mother to be the owner of the Barbaro, Daniel Curtis had been regarded as the heir apparent. To some degree, he shared that view.
“Selling the house—selling the piano nobile—has been a trauma for my mother,” he said. “She is the sort of person who, like me, even though she lives among millions of beautiful things, if by accident she breaks a single glass, she is devastated. You know? And for us, selling the piano nobile was like breaking every beautiful thing in the house.”
He smoked a cigarette and leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, as he spoke with intense feeling about the Barbaro.
“But my Aunt Lisa and my Uncle Ralph outvoted my mother, and that meant the end of the Curtis piano nobile. Then they had to divide all the soprammobili—the ornaments, the ancient boxes, glass bowls, ashtrays, all sorts of nice things. And, believe me, when you’re dealing with a piano nobile of ten thousand square feet there’s a hell of a lot of soprammobili. And they had to be divided fast, and nobody could call an antique dealer to get an estimate of the value. They put all the objects on the floor of the big dining room in three rows, and they made all of the rows equal. Then, once they all agreed that the rows were more or less the same, they drew lots to see who got which row. And afterwards, when everybody’s standing around and thinking, ‘Well, what did I get?’ I see my aunt go from her row to one of the other rows and take something from that row and put it in her own row, and then she puts something from her row into the other row. I said nothing. I stood there silently, thinking, ‘What an aunt I have.’
“I tell you, if I had had the power I should have had, this house would never have been sold. But I could not say anything. As we say, ‘Non ho voce in capitolo,’ I had no voice in the matter. Because in this family, the Curtis family, the decisions have to be made by the leadership, not by the full membership. And the leadership is my mother and her husband; my Aunt Lisa, la comtesse, and her husband, le comte, and my Uncle Ralph and his fucking space astronauts and Monkeyface. But—”
He suddenly stood up, the better to make his point.
“There is a difference,” he said, “between me and all the other Curtises—the five generations of Curtises in Venice, starting with my great-great-grandfather, Daniel Sargent Curtis. Do you know what it is? I am the only Venetian! In five generations, I am the only Curtis with any Venetian blood. My father was a genuine Venetian, born and raised in Venice.”
He walked to the window and looked down into the courtyard. Then he turned around and leaned against the windowsill.
“Do you know what it is to be a Venetian? Venetians are very tough, they are very quarrelsome. They argue seriously for honor, and the vocabulary of the ancient dialect is very earthy. Venetians have expressions that are so incredibly vulgar they cannot possibly be taken literally, because if you took them literally, you would have to kill the person who said it to you.
“But what Venetians have that is ver
y good is that they don’t get excited about whether you are a king, a queen, the president, or la comtesse or le comte. Venetians are very democratic. They are all brothers. They all help each other. And it is the same for me, because I am Venetian. To me the baker is my brother. But for my mother and my aunt and my uncle, the baker is the baker.
“I love this house as a Venetian, not just as a Curtis. It is part of me. If a piece of it breaks off, I save it. I have everything of this house. Look!”