A winter nosegay, Orticoline d'Inverno - Milan, Italy.

A winter nosegay: a handful of bright red anemones, the dense, white waxen buds of viburnum, a single rose shaded vanilla ice cream, glossy, lanceolate, deep green leaves, small, orange rose berries and a simple raffia ribbon around the bare stems.

It was a present. I received it at “Orticoline d'inverno”, the market flower show held at the beginning of December, in Milan, Italy. This is the second winter edition, but my first visit, while I am a loyal visitor of the most famous exhibition that occurs in May in Via Palestro, always-in Milan. I made a wise “sortie” reaching, soon after lunch, the Museo Diocesano, where the show was located. Opened in 2001, this museum collects ancient and precious works of art of sacred inspiration and liturgical use from the parishes of the surrounding area.

The show developed in two large rooms at either sides of the entrance, after an aisle I hastily crossed. Art and flowers welcomed the visitors in a warm environment, with the characteristic perfume of plants, the red of Christmas and the hum of voices. On display were rich collections of orchids, cyclamen and poinsettias, particular vegetal worlds that attract a numerous public eager for answers and newness. All the others, included me, looked at them with curious and amazed glances, merely enjoying the variety of colours and shapes, in a complete ignorance of names, places of origin and cultivation requirements. I lingered longer in the other room, before the shelves covered with moss, embroidered with ferns and hidden under expensive hellebores. A triumph of red and violet berries, especially skimmia and gaultheria, surrounded them so that you hardly realized the gigantic paintings on the wall behind. The delicate flowers of the winter camellias were scattered in the room. Exotic flowers deserved a picture, a thought and the promise to see the banksie and the airy tillandsie in their natural world, during the incoming year. Old style garden furniture inspired large country mansions covered with abundant snowfalls and crowded with children and dogs. It turned out that the stone fountain plate, with a small bird craved on the edge, is a successful centerpiece for the tables in Milan. Tea and pastries were expected for five o’clock in the afternoon.

At the entrance, a patient team composed bunches of flowers upon request.They fished the needed material from blue buckets. Flowers had reached Milan from the conservatories in San Remo, a town by the Mediterranean Sea.

This charming nosegay reminds me of another winter bunch. It was described in an article written by Mrs. Vita Sackville-West for the column she wrote for the “Observer” from 1946 to 1961. Later, many of these articles were collected in a lovely book “In Your Garden”. In her simple but careful style she presented the plants and places she knew, an everyday garden life she deeply loved and lived.

February 26, 1950
A dear near neighbour brought me a tussie-mussie this week. […] a nosegay […] It is composed of at least five different flowers, all perfectly chosen. She goes always for the best, which I am sure is the secret of good gardening: choose always the best of any variety you want to grow. Thus, in the bunch she brought me, the violet were pink violets, the sort called Coeur d’Alsace, and Iris Reticulata she put in was the sort called Hercules, which is redder than the familiar purple and gold. […] The anemone that she put in must be a freakishly early bloom of Anemone St. Bavo, amethyst petals with an electric-blue centre. (Sackville-West, 2004; 35)


I am not sure about the specie of these anemones, but […] a flowerless room is a soul-less room. (Sackville-West, 2004; 150)

I really love to see my winter nosegay in bloom on a table against a window that frames the first whirls of snow.


Flower show:
ORTICOLINE D’INVERNO - MUSEO DIOCESANO C.so di Porta Ticinese, 95 - MILANO
http://www.orticola.org/mostra.htm


Further readings:
In Your Garden – V. Sackville-West, First Frances Lincoln Edition, 2004 from Books Google December 2009
http://books.google.it/books?q=in+your+garden

A mon seul désir - La Dame à la licorne - Cluny Museum, Paris France

There was a last althea in flower in the cobblestone courtyard of the Cluny Museum in Paris, quiet and silent in an early morning of an October working day. A restless glance ran along the crenellated walls, over the small windows, the dormers and the turrets, over the steep slate roof to a clear sky and then back to a small door. I already knew what I would have seen beyond: details of a medieval life made of ivory and gold, glass and wood, brass, stone and fine fabrics. In a dedicated room, the six tapestries of La Dame à la Licorne, or The Lady and the Unicorn, waited to be admired, plunged in dim light and padded atmosphere.

In 1882, the Museum purchased the cycle from the municipality of Boussac, France. Displayed in the great hall of the castle of this town, in the rural region of Limousin, the cloths fascinated Monsieur Prosper Mérimée, historian and state archaeologist. Already in 1841, he had urged interventions worried for the state of neglect in which some of them were stored. Their story began, indeed, many centuries before, when, around 1480, Flanders weavers created this refined and elegant work for a rich French cloth trader, Monsieur Jean Le Viste. Legends fill the following centuries.

The imposing tapestries show a fair and noble lady standing on a rounded blue isle assisted by a devoted maidservant, within a proud lion and a white unicorn, carrying waving flags and banners. Tall, slender trees full of fruits and flowers frame the picture. She performs simple gestures: takes a sweet from a cup, plays an instrument, holds a mirror, weaves a wreath of perfumed flowers and touches the unicorn’s horn.
The pictures stand out against a ruby red background strewn with flowers and small animals in a style called mille-fleurs, or thousand flowers.

Flowers are everywhere. Delicate hues shape forty different species. Columbine, aster, digital, stock, hyacinth, daffodil, daisy, lily, periwinkle, violet, jasmine and carnation, among others, bloom in clumps on the blue isle or fall in branches on the red background. Flowers made of silk and wool reminded spring in the cold rooms of lonely castles during the long, dark winter days.

All the elements in the tapestries are clearly recognizable. Trees are pines, oaks, hollies and oranges, while the small animals include domestic dogs, meek lambs, tender rabbits, smart foxes, monkeys and parrots.
Their different combinations and rich details make each cloth unique and denote a research for harmony and beauty in the patterns of the tapestries, probably the work of a French artist called Maître de Moulins.

These five tapestries are assumed to represent the five senses: taste, hearing, sight, smell and touch. But, this interpretation does not exhaust the complex network and the different levels of meanings. In Medieval times, each flower, fruit, animal or colour was a symbol that wrapped the universe in endless correspondences. The world was the sign of God, a message that every man could read according to his ability. It was an immediate and intuitive code to approach the divine mystery, to understand a story already written from the beginning to the end, from the Creation to the Universal Judgment.

The sixth tapestry stands alone. The lady puts her necklace in a casket held by her maidservant, standing in front of a tent which the lion and the unicorn keep opened. A small dog is sat next to her, on a soft cushion on a bench. The motto “A’ mon seul désir”, “To my only desire”, is written in gold on the top of the tent whose style recalls the East and whose ropes hide two other mysterious letters.

This tapestry should resume the meaning of the whole cycle, but its interpretation is not yet definitive. Some historians see the renounce to the physical pleasures to achieve a spiritual truth, others the celebration of the courtly love.
Symbols answered to a deep need of understanding, they were intended to amuse, instruct and reveal the truth of God, not to conceal it. They were not the mysterious and magical signs that we see today.

In the courtyard, while I buttoned my coat, I looked at the shells that encrust the wall near the entrance. They are memories of the religious origin of the building, of the pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain. The lively althea flowered nearby.

Further readings:
Storie di arazzi e di fiori – Inna Dufour Nannelli – Leonardo Arte
Letterature romanze del medioevo – Alberto Varvaro – Il Mulino

Photos:
Travel in a garden

Links:
The official site of the Cluny Museum, Paris
http:www.musee-moyenage.fr/

An elegant, detailed site about La Dame à la licorne (in French)
http://sarah.vanden.free.fr/

MENTONE - France.

There was a strong man behind this garden, with a simple idea and a pining feeling.

Mr. Vicente Blasco Ibáñez decided to settle in Mentone, southeastern France, around 1920, when his life was coming to the end. It had been a turbulent and passionate life begun in Valencia, Spain, in 1867. His lively and rebellious spirit, combined with an overbearing desire for adventure and an innate dynamism, poured in an intense political activity and in those of journalist and writer; not to mention his genuine but demanding love for beautiful women. He fought for political and social reforms, paying his republican convictions with escapes abroad and imprisonments. In 1901, he suddenly left his seat as deputy, to devote himself to conferences, writing and travels. If critics did not appreciate his exuberant and impetuous style, people loved all his copious production. After the First World War, rich and famous, he chose, with his second wife Elena, the South of France as place of residence in a voluntary exile.

At that time, the Blue Coast was the centre of the world for the multi-millionaires, who came from Europe, Russia and America to spend lazy and amusing days in a place where they could satisfy every desire. Villages and small towns lined the coast, glossy postcards from the Mediterranean Sea. Mr. Ibanez’s request to the estate agency was simple: everywhere but Mentone; his uneasiness mostly related to all those people with serious pulmonary problems who searched for relief in its mild, unique clime. Nothing suited his needs until, in an early spring morning, the agent led him to see a plot outside Mentone, close to the Italian border. He was disappointed, maybe angry but when they reached it a ribbon of orange flowers in bloom reminded him of his native Spain. He stood in silence, stunned and moved by their oily perfume. The village of Mentone was a pinkish silhouette in the distance, with the profile of steeples high above that of houses in terracotta hues, in front of the eternal blue of the sea.

Built a house means find its own place in the universe. He decided that his place had to be more than a luxury villa with a garden. His never-ending love for literature, and the desire to arrange his imposing book collection, inspired the idea of a place where writers could meet to exchange elevated thoughts and create immortal prose.

His intention is still clearly stated from the entrance: above the gate, surrounded by high walls, blue ceramic tiles portrait three famous European writers: Balzac, Cervantes and Dickens. The decoration spreads in a shiny, pale blue trail of tiles where, surrounded by yellow, orange and pink roses, the name and the purpose of the garden is written in white, first in Spanish then, on the two opposite sides, in French and English: The Garden of the Novelists. Two shields, under the Spanish inscription, celebrate the flowers and fruits of oranges and citrus, while on the two sides’ smaller shields recall, with a fountain and roses, the name he chose for this place: Fontana Rosa. But, when the gate opened, in a late morning of June, all dreams of luxuriant vegetation in an intriguing scenario, under the Mediterranean sky, vanished: all I could see was an erecting yard. Masons, plumbers and carpenters were more numerous than gardeners, and the residential buildings in the background seemed out of proportion with their flowered terraces and striped awnings hanging over it. After his death in 1928, the property passed a long period of neglect and decline till, in 1970, it was given by his heirs to the town of Mentone. The sale of several plots has reduced its size but not interest and attention, and in 1990 it was classified Historical Monument.

Works to recover and rebuilt proceed in several directions, with thrilling results. On the left, just after the entrance, a little instable and lost in the grass, stands and impressive hemicycle: The Rotunda de Cervantes. Wide steps lead to a small basin lined by simple flower beds. The water mirrors a carousel of happy putti that go singing and dancing, naked, fat babies craved in a cream stone. Above it, coloured stripes of ceramic tiles attract the glance. It is the story of The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha narrated with a hundred of amusing tiles that show the adventures of the crazy character and his miserable horse. Slender, white columns stand against the green of cypresses and oranges highlighting the bust of a severe Miguel de Cervantes. The Spanish writer was his preferred, but others deserved his praises, among them, in his personal parade were Boccaccio, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Goethe, Tolstoy and Zola. Their bronze busts, made by the Russian artist Léopold Bernstamm, were scattered in different areas of the park shaded by tall palms, Ficus and araucaria. In the garden, small areas were created with benches arranged around fountains or small basins. They were surrounded by columns or pergolas covered with wisteria and invaded by the perfume of roses and jasmines planted in the back of the benches. Ceramic tiles covered all surfaces with different styles and subjects. Many of them, as different citrus plants and the first gardeners, were imported from Spain while others were produced locally. Andalusia gardens with their Moresque suggestions, features and architecture inspired him, in particular Seville and its Maria Luisa Park.

Several buildings composed the property. The aquarium is a bizarre concrete cube supported by pillars with ionic capitals and fantastic decorations of butterflies and fish. Here, Mr. Ibáñez housed the fish he used to offer to his numerous guests when they waved goodbye. The columns that sustain it create an arcade where, once, the gigantic posters of the movies drawn from his books were hung, while today old photos show the estate and its habitants in their best days. A stony, dusty path turns around the house at the end of the arcade. An elevated villa appears with a large library, a private cinema and faded walls. The staircase that takes there ends in a long pergola, in course of restoration, from which you can look at the garden. Its quiet, fecund atmosphere is disturbed just by the impertinent train whistles. Mr. Ibáñez sacrificed the proximity to the sea to the newness of the railway so that his friends, coming from Paris or Nice, could arrive with no troubles just outside his door. He did not renounce to the sea. A watching tower, with an unfinished elevator and charming crenellation, stands on the edge of the property, close to the station. Its windows are closed and the name Fontana Rosa stands on its top, written with white tiles on a blue background, as an original station signs.

There is still a lot of work to do, but all the buildings, the benches, the garden will come back to its original brightness. The simple idea of a man who lived with no fear and chose the sea and the orange flowers for his last days will not be lost.

Garden visited:
Fontana Rosa, Mentone, France June 2008.

Further readings:
Milano, seduzione e simpatia - Vicente Blasco Ibanez; a cura di Teresa Cirillo - Napoli: Alfredo Guida (1993)

Photos:
Travel in a garden.

Le testament français, Andreï Makine

It is not the first time I visit a place following the pages of a book, but this time the spell was subtler: I was travelling towards a country that exixts just in the memories of a man. His words were a mighty suggestion. They woke up a vague curiosity and gave it shape and substance, those of a travel to Russia.

I never thought about the book while I was away, but once at home pictures of that country glide in my thoughts. Sometimes, they echo the pages of the book.

In the morning, in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, a woman sat on a chair observed the mass of adoring and exhausted tourists without a word, wrapped in a shawl, with a long, thick braid, where she had collected her hair now white and comfortable shoes. In a maze of collections and floors, every room opened to the public is controlled by a woman who spends the day walking within the narrow boundaries marked by the doors and trying to resist to sneaky attacks of slumber, favoured by the warmth and the boredom.
Late in the afternoon, not far from the Moskovskaya metro station, old women sold flowers and berries. They stood in small groups; covered with layers of clothes, equipped to face sudden rains and cold winds not unusual in August. Bags and bundles put behind; at their feet, violet berries filled up plastic glasses and bunches of season flowers leant out capacious buckets. As the month progressed, the electric blue centaureas left way to warm yellow rudbeckias and cheerfully, bold dahlias, nicely arranged in simple compositions. They wrapped quickly the chosen bouquet in a plastic bag while money disappeared in their pockets, a needed contribution for their pensions. Attentive and proud, they turned away easy smiles and photographic machines with torrents of unintelligible words and eloquent gestures.

Babushka is the Russian for grandmother. In the book the term is extended to the middle-aged women depicted in the first pages. In a not distant past, in a village lost at the edges of the Russian steppe, they lived in rural, wooden houses that, among their planks, kept the intense smell of traditional life, of dark shawls and frozen winters. As the mad man of the village entered the courtyard, where a group of old Caucasian women was perched in whispers, they swarmed scandalised in their houses. Just the narrator’s grandmother, Charlotte, did not escape but talked to him with hearty and controlled words. She was not a babushka. In spite of the harsh experiences of her life, so exceptional for an Italian reader but so sadly common for people who live in the Russia, she had not lost kindness and concern for people, she never gave up. Her face mirrored her inner peace. The endless horizon of the steppe, the limpid, silent air and the pungent smell of the grass had damped bitterness and pain in a simple life of readings and friendship.

I found woods of pine and birches, marshes, pastures and small lakes outside Saint Petersburg. Wooden houses submerged by late summer flowers lined the road where, on Sunday evening, women and men sold their vegetables to people who were driving back to the town. That evening I sipped a soup with mutton and dried cherries, with fragments of dill scattered on the surface, sit alone in a smoky restaurant.

“Le potage de Sibérie”, these words flashed in my mind a couple of days ago, when I saw tidy bundles of herbs arranged in a corner of the stall, at the market. The Siberian soup, dried grass and roots soaked in hot water, was the last resource for a starving, young Charlotte and her mother, during an unreasoning cold winter in a country ravaged by war and revolution.

In the daily food market on Vasileskij Island fruits, vegetables, flowers, cheese, poultry and more were attractively on display. The Neva River was right at the end of the road, with huge keels unloading wood and cruise boats. People moved quietly among the booths. But, under a leaden sky that threatened rain, I did not see a boy and his sister who, expelled unjustly from the long, desperate queue, looked at each other with understanding glances and whispered words in a foreign language: “Bartavelles et ortolans truffé rotis…” These words took them away, in a distant town by the sea, with a misty air stirred by seagulls and a salty smell, away from a gloomy day, and nervous, tired people who queued for hours to buy few oranges.
Their grandmother, Charlotte, had taught them those French words.

At twilight, on a terrace flooded by flowers, overlooking a blazing steppe, a French woman told her grandchildren about France, her native country. She mixed memories with fragments of historical events, the romantic characters of popular books with the sensual rhyme of lyric poems; she used foreign words and clippings, following the bounds and unexpected turns of curiosity rather than the regular pace of a chronological order. It emerged the “Atlantide français”, the French Atlantis. It was a magic, unintelligible world to which the narrator’s studies and researches gave more solid foundations but less dreamy atmosphere. Then, it became his secret refuge, a hidden world for a solitary, proud and surly adolescent, who did not hesitate to renegade it when his life changed dramatically. It was turned into jokes and anecdotes for his new friends, with the rage of a deceived boy and the pain of a now orphan child. But, he could not cancel it, as he could not deny the reality in which he was living. Mad with rage he faced Charlotte. In a melting summer, he reconciled with her and himself following new words that told him about her Russian world. Adult, he left Russia for France where reality almost killed him until the memory of Charlotte invaded his thoughts. Her words were a mighty suggestion. They seized him and showed his way, that of a writer that today lives in France.

Further reading:
Le testament français, Andreï Makine Mercure de France, Collection Folio

Photos:
Travel in a garden

Catalogues for autumn evenings.

During autumn evenings, especially Sunday evenings when the rush of the weekend is over and the working week is just a vague idea, a fair number of old plant catalogues peeps among magazines, newspapers and special weekend editions piled by the bed. Older then ten years, they introduced me to the plant world and today, as autumn tasks call, I still turn to them for inspiration.

I found the first addresses in a French garden magazine. "Les Jardins de Cotelle" was one of my favourite and the name of a nursery and a magic garden in Normandy, North of France. An A4 format page of thick paper in green-grey hue, it had a couple of pages with glossy photographs, quick descriptions that stressed heights and exposure, and small schemes where plants with similar needs were grouped: shade, lime soil and so on. It was what a curious but inexperienced beginner needed to start. France became an important source. I received, among the others: "Fragrance" with a wrinkled, orange cover, specialized in scented shrubs and climbers, and "Ellebore", thin but crowded with bulbs and expensive hellebore. I scanned the wide world of old roses with the catalogue "Les Roses Anciennes de André Eve" while I nurtured my love for peonies with "Pivoines Riviere".

UK catalogues followed and I was ready for those more detailed and specialized. "Richard Hardy Ferns Ltd" had a pink cover and impossible names for those green, impalpable and humid fronds, "Washfield Nursery" offered alpine hardy plants and shrubs enamelled with encouraging adjectives, and "Avon Bulbs", with their autumn to spring editions, showed tempting collections with many photographs. "Costwold garden flowers" was small and sober, not many words and no photographs in the 1997 edition but I am proud to say, I could deal with it with no other support: flowers were no more strangers to me.

In my learning process, I faced trees and shrubs after bulbs and perennials. I sent many envelopes towards France and UK, and results did not disappoint. I have several editions of the French catalogue "Pépinières Gérard & Claudie Adeline", a copy of "Pépinière botanique Plantymen" with red crosses and dense notes near the names of the new wonders, and several catalogues dedicated to Mediterranean plants. "Blubell Nursery", from UK, included in its short descriptions interesting information about the provenance of the plants, "Nursery Mallet Court" dedicated 15 pages to the Acer collection, and "Glendoick Gardens Ltd", a mail order catalogue from Scotland, gave a new impulse to the search of rhododendron and azaleas while magnolias were the stars of the "Burncoose catalogue".

Italian catalogues are less numerous: visiting nurseries was easiest and more exciting even if it was really hard find all those plants and flowers I saw in the foreign magazines. Two names are tied to my beginnings: "Floricultura Coccetti Aldo & Bruno S.S." a fundamental discover when Diascia and Nepeta were unknown names in Italy and still a qualified and friendly support, and "Mini Arboretum Sas di Guido Piacenza & C." with collections of shrubs, courses and generous advices. Unfortunately, it closed its activity several years ago.

After hours of study, investigations on the spot become essentials. However, wandering in the garden in a golden, warm autumn afternoon can distract. Violet-skinned figs fat and sweet are under the attack of greedy wasps so you had better hurry up not to miss them. Close to the fig plant, bunches of American grapes are hidden under wide, green leaves, and lumpy pumpkins lie on the lawn.

Take a look to other gardens could suggest new ideas, too. Exuberant season flowers attract the gaze as I bicycle along quiet province streets: dahlia with improbable hues, stiff zinnias in bold mixtures, thin asters shaded in violet and more fashionable pink, solitary linarie in late, waving anemone, hairy cosmos, dark amaranthus, matted callistephus, and from rudbeckia to marigolds the whole band of warm and ripe yellow.

The unmistakable scent of olea fragrans reminds me of the incoming season.

Autumn gives a special energy; old plant catalogues creative power and a bold start.

Summer.

There is a patriotic mood in the summer flower-beds in Milan.

A proud Italian mind has arranged them with white and red impatiens, the glass flowers or fiori di vetro, in Italian. A cunning mind too, that knew he could confide in the small and discreet leaves of this flower for the green of the Italian flag. Today, in the appropriate conditions of hot, half-shade, humidity and indifference, the white and red flowers swell and whip in soft masses, where not a single petal is spoiled or tired.

Exceptions to the rule are pink petunias and spotted begonias.

Abundant colonies of petunias have been planted here and there in the town. The same mind proved to be an elegant one choosing to leave them alone to explode in their pinkish splendour that hides a candy smell and sticky stems. One flower and one colour, something simple and refined for the dirty, sultry and now desert streets of Milan.

In the end, the mind reveals to be a traditional one. He ignored sophisticated and bold combination, as slender grass and airy verbena for example, to turn to common begonias. Their dangling flowers and long, shiny, spotted leaves are mixed with coloured impatiens in different shades of red and fuchsia. With a creative jump, he decided to arrange the ambitious impatiens in elegant bubbles, or better, in festoons among the begonias creating new perspectives and unusual geometries for the cheap plants.

I'm sure that now, the tired and sweated mind is on holidays. At nine o'clock in the evening, he waits for the dinner, standing on a terrace, in front of a smooth sea, with a glass of white wine, white linen trousers and the nose burned by the excess of sun.

Surrounded by crazy vases crammed with geraniums, coreopsis, petunias, ageratums, zinnias, phlox, celosias and all those yellow, orange, blue and violet colours he banned from Milan, will he be inspired or disgusted?

Next year, same place, same time we'll know.

I'll be away for a while. Thank for your attention and support.

Wish you holidays out of controll and a safe return.

I'll be here waiting for you.

Summer walk in Saint-Jean-Cap Ferrat, France.

The sun is hot and burns since the very first hours of the day. The sky has no hesitations in its compact blue. A gentle breeze agitates the top of the cypresses, ruffles the lentisk shrubs and lulls the large umbrella of the maritime pines, scattering small powered bullets and resin perfume. Lonely cicadas rest among the branches. They challenge the wrapping silence with a syncopated sound that ignores the noise of the sea. Not the rhythmical murmur of smooth and polished cailloux, which roll back and forth, pushed and grabbed by waves that break on crowded beaches, but the strong crash of billows that, from the open sea, slam against the rocks.

As you pass beyond the gate of the small cemetery, gravel creaks under your steps, white and crispy as handfuls of confetti. Small pebbles cover the area among the tombs nested in the peninsula in the first kilometres of the Blue Coast, in the southeaster France, in Saint-Jean- Cap Ferrat.

Graves are closed to the boundary walls or in the centre, white and sober parallelepipeds that lay on the ground as boxes. Marble books lean on them, with opened pages that, with names and dates, tell the story of the village.

Bunches of fresh flowers face a relentless sun to surrender untidily. More reliable are the bright garlands moulded in the clay, whose generous violets and roses never fade. Two daturas bow their dangling pale flowers close to the entrance, while crimson geraniums, escaped from a vase long time ago, dip their roots in the gravel and lengthen their clumsy branches in the air.

If you raise your glance, away from the sparkling sea and beyond the cemetery walls, you see the statue of a crowned Madonna, close to a small chapel, her bronze mantle unfolds near the cypresses. She holds a sceptre and her child watching over the sea. It is an imposing, beautiful statue, 11 metres high, dated 1903. The near, tiny church - the Chapelle Saint-Hospice - is older: it was built during the XI century on the ruins of a tower where hermit Saint-Hospice lived during the VI century. He was a friar known and respected for his miracles, his prophecies and a frugal life.

To reach the cemetery, which is closed to the American military one, you can drive comfortably up to the hill or you can walk.

Leaving Saint-Jean port and keeping your left you reach Paloma beach. There, after a refreshing swim in the clear water, a tasty lunch and an unavoidable nip, you will be ready to keep up the Sentier du Litoral - the Coastal Path. The sea is so closed you feel the spray of the waves and longing secret villas, hidden under a screen of thick vegetation, you arrive in Pointe St.Hospice. To reach the cemetery you have to make a diversion up to the hill. Otherwise, following the path, you will find the small bay of La Pinede and then decide to go back to the port or continue towards Cap Ferrat and its lighthouse.

Summer with music, traffic and laughs is not far. Instead, to rest in the eternity peace a silent sky and a mighty sea is all you need.

Gardens to visit in the neighbourhood:
Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild; http://www.villa-eprhussi.com/

Photos:
Travel in a garden
except: Nuvole, Sofia P.

Du côté de chez Swann : Combray – Marcel Proust.

Spring suits Proust. The gentle breeze turns over the pages, the warm sun heats the words and they bloom, careful, polite and plentiful. They fall down beyond the paper running after each other, burning and exploding. It is “Combray”: an imagined village, somewhere in the North of France, with dark streets named after medieval Saints and a slow, uneventful life that hinges around the steeple of its church. Chimes scan the holiday days of the narrator at his aunt Leonie’s house. Their tran-tran is described with long sentences and minute descriptions that seem lose themselves in a casual order, sometimes exasperating. On the contrary, no episode or detail is useless or superfluous: a careful plan supported by a solid literary theory, link them and it is developed in the nine volumes that compose A’ la Recherche du temps perdu. Combray is the first of the three books grouped under the title of Du côté de chez Swann. Released in 1913 by the French editor Grasset at Proust’ own expenses, this is the first volume of the Recherche.

The narrator describes his morning visits to aunt Leonie, who confined herself in two rooms owing to inexistent diseases and eccentric ideas, and the respectful visits of the priest, who kept her informed about the life in the parish. The cake bought after the Mass on Sunday morning, and the troubles and the gossips with the servants. The long evening talks with Monsieur Swann, and the walks in the country. Uncertain weather or late leavings addressed him, at that time a child, with his father and grandfather, towards Méséglise-la Vineuse, or the Swann’s side because, during the walk, they passed his property. Otherwise, they walked towards the Guermantes’s house, along the small river of the Vivonne with fresh, transparent waters. The rich bourgeois, whose daughter Gilberte make him feel in love for the first time, or the nobles, whose name opened a world of mighty suggestions. Two families and two different worlds, whose story ends, in the last volume of the Recherche, a few years after the end of the First World War.

The perfume of faded lilacs, the nasturtium scattered along the alley towards M.Swann’s villa, the hedge of hawthorn or the buttercups and the water lilies floating on the water of the Vivonne.

« … les boutons d’or. Ils étaient fort nombreux à cet endroit qu’ils avaient choisi pour leurs jeux sur l’herbe. Isolé, par couple, par troupes, jaunes comme un jaune d’œuf, brillants d’autant plus, [...] Les bras vers eux sans pouvoir épeler complètement leur joli nom de Princes de contes de fées françaises, venus peut-être il y a bien des siècles d’Asie mais apatriées pout toujours au village contents du modeste horizon, aimant le soleil et le bord d’eau, fidèles à la petite vue de la gare, gardant encore pourtant comme certaines de nos vieilles toiles peintes, dans leur simplicité populaire, un poétique éclat d’orient. »
“..the buttercups. They were numerous in the place they had chosen for their plays in the grass. Alone, coupled, trouped, yellow like the yellow of the egg, and glossier […] My arms towards them, I was unable to spell their pretty name of Princes of French fairy tales, they came from Asia maybe long time ago, but now belong to the village for ever, happy of this modest horizon, loving the sun and the banks of the river, loyal to the small sight of the station, still keeping, as our old paintings, in their popular simplicity, an oriental poetic splendour…”

Flowers attracted the narrator and he observed them, stopping in front of buzzing walls during his walks. He analyzed their shape and colour, their perfume and attitude: how they lean out curious in a shaded spot or, not invited, lengthen their supple branches against the church front. He perceived a hidden secret, but he was not able to reveal it.
Proust described flowers with the accuracy of a botanical, checking times of flowering and the hue of a petal, and the eye of a painter. He painted with accurate words borrowed from the religious and architectural vocabulary. They give shape and substance. They return more then just pleasant scenery and a conventional beauty, but a transfigured reality where flowers have intentions and thoughts, human temper and magic powers. They are oriental princesses, exotic houri and spring nymphs, metaphors that, bringing nearer different worlds, reveal new and deeper meanings.

Wild nature welcomed the narrator in its leafy, damp and shiny green world as he rushed out after long hours of reading. Jumps and shouts expressed the exaltation and compressed energy he has accumulated. Alone, in a shelter spot, he spent his days in reading and dreaming, plunged in a life that was more real and fascinating than his own. Many pages are dedicated to books both as a reading pleasure and as a spasmodic desire to be a writer. They were not just emotions and adventures, but a key to understand Beauty and Truth, to take possession of universal, higher thoughts, as just a sensitive, fanciful, bored and arrogant young mind can believe possible. Sometimes, there was a kind of rage in his runs that he vented beating innocent branches: it was a desire, a pleasure he satisfied alone in a closed room invaded by the scent of iris.
Proust spent his life among books: writing, translating and commenting. He thought they lead us to the threshold of our spiritual life. Here, every one has to continue alone. They can help us to develop our spirit but not to substitute it with a truth someone else has elaborated. Du coté de chez Swann was the natural development of another book he never finished, Contre Saint-Beuve. Here, he demolished the literary theory of a famous literary critic for his own’. Books and flowers are but parts of this theory.
Flowers awakened his sensitiveness, his desire to find suitable words to describe them and all the sensations they reminded. Mere intelligence is not enough, instinct gives the direction and this leads inside himself. The hidden correspondences between unsuspicious objects and our mind, so called unintentional memories, conspire to awake our memories. The past that then emerges has a special value, has the taste of true life, a taste that just literature can reveal. Otherwise, it will be lost forever.

Flowers haunted the book from the very first pages. The taste of a Madeleine, a soft biscuit, casually dipped in a cup of tea in a cold day brought back those days:
« …toutes les fleures de notre jardin et celles du parc de M.Swann, et les nymphéas de la Vivonne, …tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé .. »
« … all the flowers of our garden and those of Mr.Swann’s park and the water-lilies of the Vivonne,… all that gets shape and solidity, is coming out, towns and gardens, from my cup of tea. »

To translate that world that urged inside him Proust lived isolated, for the last years, in a dark cork-lined apartment, threatened by a declining health. He used so many words to create pictures that escape from the pages to flow in your mind leaving ineffaceable traces. He closed the door and wrote because:

«.. les livres sont l’œuvre de la solitude et les enfants du silence. Les enfants du silence ne doivent rien avoir de commun avec les enfants de la parole, les pensées nées du désir de dire quelque chose, […] la matière de nos livres, la substance de nos phrases doit être immatérielle...»
“…books are the work of solitude and the children of silence. The children of the silence have nothing to do with the children of words, thoughts born from the desire to say something… the matter of our books, the substance of our sentences has to be immaterial.”

He died in November, when nothing but memories could bring back the joy of spring flowers.

Further reading:
Du coté de chez Swann – Marcel Proust ed. Gallimard
Contre Saint-Beuve – Marcel Proust ed. Gallimard

Photos :
Travel in a garden
Except : Nuvola, Sofia P.

Spring.

The men worked fast.

With rakes and spades,

in a few hours,

they changed a half-moon of dust

in

A coloured smile,

A tray of fresh drinks,

A proud parade,

A cheap necklace,

A hat of old rags,

An easy refrain...

Pansies and Primroses

Spring according to Milan.

MARRAKESH - Morocco (part III)

Maybe Monsieur Majorelle knew the story of this colour, a passionate one. First, highly scorned because associated to barbarian tribes and then, from the end of the Middle Ages, celebrated as light that comes from God. The mourning and grief that darkened the Madonna’s cloak in the deepest and sad colours, starting from the XII century, were expressed just with the blue that, little by little, became brighter and charming. Obtained from the precious and expensive lapis lazuli, it was used parsimoniously by the painters of the XVII century, who still discussed the mystery of colours until science, a century later, explained it with laws and numbers.

There are other gardens in Marrakesh, once one of the greenest towns in North Africa. They celebrate the Islamic garden with its rules and its features. A tradition spread from ancient times, from the South of Spain to India through Sicily, Morocco, Tunisia and Afghanistan. Each of them has developed a different story, starting exactly from the word that designates “garden”. In Morocco, just one word can not express its variety: a single name could not contain the extent of an orchard and the quiet freshness of a courtyard. Here a short-list (1):
- Agdal: is a Berber word that once designated public meadows and now large, enclosed orchards, artificially irrigated;
- Arsa: is an urban, irrigated apple-orchard;
- Jnan: are cultivated fields in the desert oasis;
- Riyad: indicates a small patio in an urban, private house. It is paved with marble, tiles or bricks, has a small pavilion or fountain in the centre and it is surrounded by galleries. Perfumed plants, symmetrically planted, are privileged.

In Marrakesh there are samples for all of them. The Aguedal Gardens, a vast orchard with lemons, oranges, apricots and olive trees; the Menara Gardens, an imperial garden with an enormous pool and an enchanting pavilion surrounded by olive and fruit trees; the Palace Bahia, or The Palace of the Favourite, with courtyards paved with marble and zellij tile works, planted with cypresses, orange trees and jasmine and embellished with pools; the Palmeraie or Palm Grove that, according to a legend, grew from the stones left on the ground by soldiers of a 11th-century Almohad sultan and once was irrigated by khettaras, an ingenious system that conveyed water from the High Atlas Mountains. Or, you just have to stroll to see, against the ramparts that encircles the old town, the shadow of tall palms sketched by the same relentless and untameable sun that changed the life of Monsieur Majorelle.

Le Jardin de Majorelle was a surprise that did not finish when I left it. A year later, I was in Seville, Spain. From the top of the Giralda tower I thought to the minaret that had served as its model: the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakesh. In my bag I had a small book I have just purchased, the story of Le Jardin de Majorelle.


Gardens visited in Marrakesh, Morocco on December 2005:
Le Jardine de Majorelle, Menara Gardens, Le Palais de la Bahia.

Photos:
Travel in a garden;
For the paintings Itinéraires marocains: regards de peintres, Maurice Arama,
Part I : Le souk aux tapis à Marrakech, huile sur toile, M.B.A. de Nancy
Part III: Le Marchè de Tanger, 1918 huile

Further readings:
Majorelle, a Moroccan Oasis, Pierre Bergé and Madison Cox, Thames&Hudson, 1999
Itinéraires marocains: regards de peintres, Maurice Arama, avant-propos de Gaston Diehl Paris, Jaguar 1991.
Bleu, historie d’une couleur, Michel Pastoureau ; traduction of Fabrizio Ascari, Milano Ponte delle Grazie, 2002.
Il Giardino Islamico, Luigi Zangheri, Brunella Lorenzi, Nausikaa M. Rahmati, Firenze, L.S. Olschki, 2006. (1)
Il giardino islamico: architettura, natura paesaggio, Attilio Petruccioli, Milano Electa 1994.

MARRAKESH - Morocco (part II)

In 1931 he painted the studio in a cobalt blue, the same hue that tinged windows and doorframes in the unknown Berber villages lost in the mountains. This bold colour, little by little, spread all over the other surfaces of the garden, protected by high earth walls: pergolas, fountains, pools, water canals, steps, garden pots.
Now, he privileged the enclosed and silent space of the studio for his paintings and the smooth, naked skin of local women as subject. His abundant production was exposed and highly requested in Europe as locally. He alternated shouting colours to quiet oils, metallic shades to pencil, often following the fashion of the moment and the demand, rather than an original and personal view.

More job waited him outside, those blue walls had transformed the garden in a picture that required firm strokes, new shapes and infinitive shades of green.

Plants came from all over the world. The virus that changes pacific, prudent gardener beginners in fanatic plant collectors had soon infected Monsieur Majorelle. He contacted nurseries and botanic gardens, exchanged seeds, financed plant expeditions, collected plants in the wild ...“Cacti [were] imported from the American Southwest, palms shipped from the South Pacific, succulents from South Africa, and water lilies and lotus collected in Asia…”(1).
He landscaped a garden following his own project and taste, caring about local traditions, free from any nostalgia of European mixed borders, topiary and kitchen gardens.

Tall palms occupy the sky, fat cactus share spacious beds scattered with pebbles and explode with joyful unexpected flowers, eye-catching plants stand as single specimens in privileged corners. Purple bougainvilleas stretch trustfully, screens of bamboos hide geraniums of exaggerated size with enamelled flowers. Unknown plants, with disquieting foliage, silently thrive nourished by the admired glances of pale tourists.
Water refreshes the air, laps the paths flowing in narrow rills, and explodes in jets in geometric fountains, to slow down in quiet angles.
Its different sounds mingle with the twittering of birds and people stifled voices. Introduced by Monsieur Majorelle, turtles and bullfrogs dwell under the canopy of trees.

In a corner there is a small museum: the Museum of Islamic Arts; Monsieur Yves Saint-Laurent transformed the studio in a place where beautiful domestic objects, locally produced, gleam from the shelves.

After Monsieur Majorelle sudden death in 1962 the garden declined for several years until it was rescued by a famous French couturier Monsieur Yves Saint-Laurent that, with his partner Monsieur Pierre Bergè, purchased it in the early 1980s.

They restored and enriched this garden following the idea of a French painter that, in the dappled shade of slender palms, had consecrated the Blue colour.


-to be continued

Notes:
(1) Majorelle, a Moroccan Oasis, Pierre Bergé and Madison Cox, Thames&Hudson, 1999.

Photos:
Travel in a garden.

MARRAKESH - Morocco (part I)

I knew nothing but its name when I entered the gates of the Jardin de Majorelle in an early morning of the late December.

Winter in Marrakesh means cold downs, early sunsets and heavy snow on the close Atlas Mountains. The muezzin wakes up the town; his solemn prayers flutter over a sky that is never cloudy or rainy for long, over flat roofs in terracotta shades bristled with antennas and fluttering clothes. Trades, markets and traffic begin then in a crescendo. By the time tourists leave their elegant riyad, streets will be crowded with carts and buggies, drawn by donkeys driven by men muffled in sombre, pointed djellabah. White, old taxis miraculously avoid careful pedestrians, smoky motorbikes and rusty bicycles. Vegetables are on offer in scanty heaps on stalls or scattered on mats, scanned by still cats lurking in the shadow. Stray, lean dogs rove around butchers’ windows where bodies of male animals are exposed. Impassive glances cross coloured veils, big air-conditioning buses and pinkish dust. Habit breeds indifference: they never rise to sift the squared minaret of the Koutoubya Mosque, they never stop to turn back the world when its surface dazzled in full moon wrapped in ceramics and stuccos.

This is the life, the energy and the light that fascinated Monsieur Jacques Majorelle when he first visited this country in 1917.

Son of Monsieur Louis Majorelle, a famous French furniture-maker who was involved in the development of the Art Nouveau movement in France, he became a painter, after his first studies as architect and decorator. To complete his education, he travelled diffusely to Spain, Italy and Greece lingering in milder climates, kindling creative sparkles. In 1910 he left his native Nancy, France, the snowy, small north-eastern town where ‘700 left tidy squares with impressive golden railings plunged in a persistent scent of vanilla, for Cairo, Egypt. The simple life of ordinary people, who live in the outskirts of the town, as the majestic temples of the High-Egypt became his endless subjects for four years. Here, he experimented with colours and pictorial techniques, with the shape of people and places and with a relentless and untameable sun.

Then, the family friend and Resident-General of France in Morocco, General Lyautey invited him to Marrakesh. The dry, hot climate revealed itself excellent for his poor health and its light inspired and challenged this painter as many other European and American artists in that period. Trailed by ancient tales, shifting his horizons as he travelled southward in the African continent or he faced the Atlas Mountains with bearers carrying easel and trunks, he settled there.

A few years later, he acquired a plot of land outside the Walled Medina, in the Nouvelle Ville; he built a small house and a studio, and spent the rest of his life painting and creating this garden, open to public for the first time in 1947.

Colours, plants, water and animals feature Le Jardin de Majorelle today as when Monsieur Majorelle created it.

He defined himself a “gardenist”, colours were his language. In 1931 he painted the studio in a cobalt blue.

-to be continued

Photos:

Travel in a garden.
The painting: Le souk aux tapis à Marrakech, huile sur toile, M.B.A. de Nancy
Itineraires marocaines, Maurice Arame

Walden; or life in the woods - By Henry David Thoreau.

I started reading Walden, or life in the woods from Chapter 13 “House-warming”. I jumped over Chapter 14 “Former Inhabitants”, started again with Chapter 15 “Winter Animals” and plodded along Chapter 16 “The Pond in Winter”. Then I stopped, checked the length of the last two Chapters, Chapter 17 “Spring” and Chapter 18 “Conclusion”, and judiciously decided to ignore them to dash myself randomly in the previous twelve Chapters.

This book is included in the selection of authors I have to study for my Anglo-American Literature exam. At first, it seemed inviting: a report of two years and two months spent by the author in a small house he built himself, on the shore of Walden pond, in a wood close to the small town of Concord, Massachusetts. I did not suppose it to be particularly exciting or surprising, but a pleasant and fluent reading, neither discouragingly long nor excessively boring.
To my surprise, all my endeavours ended in slumbering readings quickly neglected, with faint excuses, for sudden, more important tasks.

Then, there came the snow: large, white snowflakes whirled slow and fast for an entire day, the last day of the Christmas holidays. Snowfalls are not unusual in early January in Milan. What retained my eyes was the obstinacy and the disarming energy of these snowflakes that silently were covering the town. They reminded me a passage of the book. I started turning over the pages to find it, towards the end:

“…The snow had already covered the ground…, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavoured to keep a bright fire both within my house and my breast.” (chapter 13)

Winter did not surprise him: he had gathered wild apples and shiny chestnuts, had stored in his cellar potatoes, peas, a little rice and a jug of molasses. He had lathered and plastered his house, regretting …the rough brown boards full of knots … that let cool air and light in, but admitting that now his dwelling had become more comfortable and suitable for the freezing weather. He had built a chimney too, the most vital part of the house, devoting days of hard work towards the end of summer. Snow and ice confined his world for months; in the morning, he looked for water with axe and pail and collected dead wood for the fire, a trusty companion that warmed and purified his thoughts. Silence and solitude enhanced the voices of the wood. The melodious sound of different birds sketched in his words, which combine the preciseness of science to the intenseness of literature, perfect pictures of a life ...above a forest of solemn pines bent down with snow. The morning run of red squirrels over his roof, that woke him up and then amused him with their quick and crazy acts. The raged and demoniacal bark of foxes which ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game (chapter 15). The creaking of the snow while he travelled, some eight or ten miles away, to pay a visit to an old pine, a beech-tree or a yellow-birch whose outlines had been shaped and re-design by the snow. The sound of the ice, which had turned the smooth surface of the pond in a living lesson, applies to nature and to men as well.

This is not my winter. This is a wild nature, not hostile but mysterious and unknown. Busy in a never-ending cycle that repeats itself in seasons, in days, in the life of all beings, always the same but always different and so worth to be present at it.

He went to the woods to front only the essential facts of life. Simplicity and discipline were his means to reach pure thoughts, to find an inspiration that was always more difficult to seize, to reconcile to a life that was addressed, by then, to maturity without the fruits he had hoped to pick up.
Thoreau wrote this book in 1847, when he left this house, but it was released just seven years later, eight years before his death. It took time to find the right words to express the renewal of his spirit using the imagines of Nature, to write an hymn to celebrate her infinitive and unrestrainable strength.

I have not finished the book yet. The glorious rebirth, the encouraging certainty that light and warm sun will rise again have just been skimmed. It is too early, even if days are longer and showy primroses are on sale. I still feel winter with its cold, low and grey sky. I still see its naked, twiggy and brown trees; brighten by car lights, with heaps of dry leaves squashed at their feet. They would only disappear, sink under the frozen asphalt covered with dirty snow, blend their brown-greyish shades with the dark ground. I still hear twittering from invisible and unknown birds that drown, for an instant, town noises, and I still need …the suggestive inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy of Winter… this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer (chapter 17).

Chapter 17 will wait until the snow has melted and new hopes are ready to spring.

Photos:
Travel in a garden.

VENICE - ITALY (second part).

The pointed grey leaves of a thick olive tree grove rose to a similar grey sky during the Saturday afternoon visit at the friaries’ garden on the island of La Giudecca.
In the shade of the Basilica del Redentore seven-something hundreds years of history were summarized in a few minutes while the small group of visitors silently swarmed through the extensive fields. Here an elderly Capuchin monk cultivates violet artichokes and other vegetables with sporadic help of younger monks, forced to leave their studies and meditations to prune vines and pick up kiwi and jujube.
A long line of faultless cypresses, introduced as ornamental plant just in the 16th Century, protects these cultivations from cold winter winds and escorts you towards the end of the garden, to a low wall overlooking the lagoon.
Just a few trees, besides cypress, stand such particular conditions of thin soil and salt water as taxus baccata and celtis australis, magnolias, for example, does not survive for a long time.

The next day, a warm, sunny Saturday, I joined the group in time to see, behind a ruined palace and a tall hedge, the roof of a once famous library. This quiet, isolated building called loggia preserved a famous collection with rare literature and history books. The simple green lawn with fruit trees could have disappointed me, as there was not much more to see, if I had not realized that what seemed to be an ordinary plantation was the result of a huge work to recover the garden from a fatal decline. I put back my notebook and I enjoyed the sun listening to the lectures laying my eyes around: ripen pomegranates weighted down the branches of the trees, a lonely statue stood proud in front of severe cypresses, a crimson ribbon of the last pelargonium flowers overhung holding vases.
I would not have found pelargonium five hundreds years ago but citrus fruits, myrtus and roses or aromatic combinations of majorana, dianthus and basilicus in terra cotta vases decorated with festoon and garlands and painted in bright red, green, blue or white to show up the flowers.

Later, after a quick pasta and confused information, I reached by vaporetto - steam-boat -the last garden, two stops before the isle of Murano, one stop before the Isle of San Michele, Venice’ cemetery.
Quiet streets led to the main door of this garden nested in the Sestiere di Cannareggio, and today owned by a religious institution. It was not its glamorous past that struck my imagination but the pink-reddish, brick wall that surrounds the garden, with intriguing windows opening on the North lagoon, that enchanted me.
An ordinary life runs close to the San Marco square: fast motorboats, old houses with washing hanging out the windows and televisions switched on at the highest volume, and not so far away the melancholy cemetery of San Michele.
Venetian gardeners never neglected boundaries walls: they had to protect but not to segregate the property. They were inspired by oriental gardens, decorated with bold battlements, with windows to let the world in.
Two snow-white angels stood at the top of two thin white columns on the wall, they smile looking at the garden ignoring those steam-boats full of tourists that tirelessly sail to and from the isle of Murano.

I left Venice late in the afternoon, loving these gardens snatched from the sea and from the oblivion, loving a town I always dislike and loving the dark clouds that, coming from east, closed again the sky.


Gardens visited in Venice – Italy on October 2005:
Giardini dei Palazzi Gradenigo e Cappello - Santa Croce Rio Marin;

Chiostro e Orto del Convento del Redentore – Giudecca; Giardino dei Palazzi Vendramin e Foscarini- Dorsoduro Carmini; Giardino di Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo – Cannaregio, Madonna dell’Orto.

Photos:

Travel in a garden.

Further Readings:
Il Giardino Veneziano. La storia, l’architettura, la botanica. Mariapia Cunico, Marsilio, 1989.

VENICE - ITALY

The first weekend of October started with a cloudy, windy, undecided Saturday after a drenched, gloomy and cold Friday.
I left Milan, early in the morning, resigned to discover under a pelting rain some of the most beautiful private gardens hidden in Venice, extraordinarily opened to public eyes just for those three days.

Gardens in Venice always surprise you: sparkling glimpses while you are sailing long the canali, top of trees that appears behind high, crooked walls while you are strolling among a calle, or a sudden, exquisite perfume that covers for a while the annoying smell of still water while you are resting at a caffè.
Their story began a long time ago when cattle pastured on chiovere, large meadows surrounded by fences where, after tincture, woollen clothes hung up to dry on chiodi, Italian for nails.
Simple, practical, with vegetables and fruits for today life and medicinal herbs for the chemists, by the end of the 17th Century they turned into scenographic, privileged spaces dedicated to pleasure and beauty.

Unexpected details enchanted me, as I guess, amazed and amused the guests of those fabulous parties, lightened by candles, lit in blown-glass fruits hanging on the trees, and disturbed by the creaking steps of satin shoes on the broken shells spread on the paths.
But entering the gates, just the words spoken by polite women with tinkling bracelets made that world live again.

In the pearl light of the Saturday morning, I discovered a noble garden large enough for horses to play in greatly admired tourneys during the 18th Century, and after around two hundreds years, decaying enough to draw the attention of a famous Italian writer, who wrapped in its neglected and wild atmosphere a sad love story.
Today a small pergola – bower - covered with wisteria, raises opposite to the existing one hidden under luxurious vine, at the end of a rectangular lawn framed by crawling plants and tall cypresses. Entrusted beauties full seasons of colours and perfumes, and following the Venetian tradition, walls disappear under climbing roses and jasmine. Venetian gardeners appreciated exotic climbing plants such as the mysterious flower of the Passiflora coerulea but did not ignore spontaneous species as Convolvulus or Clematis, this one used by wise peasants to protect melons from the sun.
An old, weeping and gnarled Sophora japonica pendula stands alone in the middle of the lawn; its simplicity captures your eyes and your heart more than hundreds of capable brushstrokes.

- to be continued