On the Brenta Riviera

As the sun rose and we waited to board our boat, our surroundings slowly emerged from the darkness: the Porta Portello, a great gate in Padua’s 16th century walls, loomed over a small canal; beneath the gate, a bridge crossed the canal, with a little shrine at its end; and, below the shrine, ancient stone steps led down to the water.  The shrine, I knew, honoured Santa Maria dei Barcaioli – St. Mary of the Boatmen – and I remembered reading that from the 16th to the 18th centuries, scores of boats left daily from here, blessed by St. Mary, and bound for Venice.

Our boat, as it headed out the canal to join the river some kilometres away, was blessed by a small bar; so, coffee in hand, I mounted to the upper deck to enjoy the risen sun and to recall some other facts about the trip we were undertaking.

The river was called the Medoacus in Roman times and it flowed from the Alps to the Adriatic, splitting in two and changing course, as rivers will; but for centuries its main course discharged its sediment-laden waters into the sea near present-day Venice, helping to form the soggy islands on which the first Venetian settlers built their huts, and their descendants built their palaces.

The Venetians called the river the Brenta.  By the 16th century they had grown wary of its powerful flow, fearful that their lagoon might become choked with silt and unnavigable, so they managed to divert the main flow south.  But they allowed a modest stream to continue in the Brenta’s old channel, to connect Padua and Venice; and they renamed it the Naviglio del Brenta.  As an alternative to Venice’s increasingly risky merchant shipping business, noble Venetian families had already begun to establish agricultural estates along its banks.

So the aristocrats could still reach their estates by water; and their favourite craft was the burchiello, with open decks and a wide, luxurious cabin below.  It was sailed or rowed in the lagoon, but on the Naviglio it was pulled by horses toiling along the banks.  For the upper-crust, burchiello trips soon became pleasure cruises, with card-games, music, gambling, wine, and perhaps even a little discreet romance.  (Casanova described them in his memoirs, Goldoni satirized them in verse, D’Annunzio wrote of them, and Goethe analysed them.)

As time passed, the country villas, like the burchielli, became more devoted to pleasure and display.  Whether Palladian, baroque, or rococo, a spectacular mansion with beautiful gardens, created by the most fashionable architects and artists, could impress friends and intimidate enemies.

Of the more than 100 villas built along the Naviglio (which we now call the Brenta Canal), many are gone, or deserted.  And some were torn apart in a deadly 2015 tornado; of one villa, only a battered loggia remains, sheltering hay bales from the weather.

But there are splendid examples left, and we called at three of them.  The first, and most elaborate, was Villa Pisani.  Its long river façade has columns, pilasters, telamones (male caryatids), and statuary along the roofline.  Built for Alvise Pisani, the 114th Doge of Venice, the villa has 114 rooms. There are extensive gardens, neoclassical stables mirrored in a vast reflecting pool, and an interior decorated by the best Venetian painters.  In 1762, Giambattista Tiepolo painted an enormous ceiling fresco showing the Pisani family sitting on fluffy clouds, or in the lap of a fetchingly nude Venus, chatting with allegories of Fame, Glory and Virtue.

Alas, such family optimism was short-lived.  In 1797 the Venetian Republic fell, and by 1807 Napoleon owned the villa.  His Empire-style bedroom is still there, though he soon gave the house to his Viceroy in Italy.  Since then, visitors have included several kings, a Czar, Lord Byron, Richard Wagner, and both Mussolini and Hitler, who met there in 1934.

Our second stop was Villa Widmann, a stately 18th century home with delightful gardens.  Inside, there are sly late baroque frescoes of the “Sacrifice of Iphigenia” and “The Rape of Helen”.  In both scenes, tragedy and violence are strangely missing – Helen, for example, instead of struggling in Paris’ grip, has one arm around his shoulders and seems to be waving goodbye with the other.

Our last call was at Villa Foscari, also called La Malcontenta.  It’s a noble house, designed by Andrea Palladio in 1555 for two brothers, Nicola and Alvise Foscari.  The grand, ionic-columned porch is like the entrance to a Greek temple.  Among the faded frescoes inside is one of a woman in 16th-century dress, looking pensively through a trompe-l’oeil door.  According to legend, she was La Malcontenta, confined to the villa by her jealous husband.

Even in her day the burchielli passed almost at her doorstep.  How tempting it must have been: to step aboard, wave goodbye to discontent (as we did), and glide downstream, out through the mouth of the Naviglio and into the Lagoon, where the familiar towers and domes of Venice seem to float on the water.

© Text © 2017 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2017 by Patricia Gartman. First published in Italia! Magazine, May 2017