Pandemic Diaries - Italian Interlude 28 Sept & 6 Oct

 28 September and 6 October – Villa Lante and Lago Bolsena

 

Our next visit was to Villa Lante, a late Renaissance villa with vast gardens and fountains originally built by Cardinal Gianfrancesco Gambara.  Yes, most of the early popes, cardinals, bishops, etc. were quite wealthy, and either members of the aristocracy or royalty.  It does seem somewhat oxymoronic, I know, but these positions in the church hierarchy were given out as political favors by the rulers of the day.  Not unsimilar to politics in the current day, with jobs like head of this department or ambassador to another nation or even a regional judge given out as favors to those who campaigned for the current leader in any given country.

 

So, work on Villa Lante began around 1566.  There’s a huge villa where the Cardinal spent summers, and a series of semi-enclosed buildings used as places of worship or friends/family could picnic and enjoy the cool summer breezes. Many of the open air buildings have beautiful frescoes on the walls and ceilings, featuring crawfish (“gambera” means “shrimp” or “crawfish” in Italian, and thus the self-adopted emblem of Cardinal Gambara).

 

After the death of the Cardinal, other politically-appointed church officials took over the property and continued to build and expand.  

 

But the gardens and fountains were coordinated into a more cohesive and harmonious masterpiece after Tommaso Ghinucci was hired.  He was a hydraulics engineer and architect from Siena, and oversaw the building of the various fountains which really make these gardens special.  

 

While the whole series of gardens is gorgeous, what I find most amazing is that all the fountains spout water completely without electricity!  Just water pressure!  Incredible, right?  The Romans did this, and apparently the Italian Renaissance, in their mission to re-birth the ancient Greek and Roman cultures, copied what the Romans did to create hydro-powered fountains!  

 

The entire garden of Villa Lante is a series of terraces, each with its own garden and featured fountain.  The fountains are said to represent the four elements of the earth – water, fire, air, and earth.  I’m not sure exactly how well they do at representing these elements, since they all have water!  But, oh well.

 

One enters the gardens at the lowest terrace, and works their way uphill.  My favorite fountain is the Pegasus fountain, who may or may not represent air.  

 

Anyway, the three of us walked all around the gardens, taking photos, admiring the frescoes and fountains, and enjoying the day.  

 

I liked La Fontana de Gigante - the Fountain of Giants.  I swear, the two giant men look like an older version of Jason Momoa!

 

Then I saw a man cleaning the fountains – he had a neon green tube he’d put down into the spout to clean out the build-up of algae and debris and who knows what.  But his neon green tube exactly matched the trim and laces on his sneakers, and went well with his vibrant goldenrod sweatshirt.  Plus every time he cleaned a spout, the water spurted up all over until the pressure subsided and the stream of water normalized.

 

He was the perfect person to photograph, besides being interesting to watch.  He went from level to level, spout to spout, cleaning the entire fountain.  By the time he finished, nearly all the spouts in this tiered stone fountain were merrily shooting water into the air in drippy arcs.

 

I’m not sure if he noticed me following him around the fountain, taking photos.  He was just sort of an ordinary looking middle-aged Italian guy, and I did feel a bit like a stalker.  But I really liked the color of his neon green tube matching the trim on his black sneakers.  That green also matched the lichen or algae growing on the fountain.  It made a great composition.  And while I realize the average person wouldn't have given him a second look, well, I'm the person who made sure the park sign I painted matched the green of the trash cans along the bike path in front of that park.  It's an artist thing.  We're just drawn to color, and need to capture special color moments in our paintings.

 

Back in the studio, I enjoyed painting him as my subject, with a vague tiered fountain and streams of water shooting up all around.  There were some technical difficulties with this painting, but I won’t go into that.  I did, however, have fun painting this, and especially doing the splatters and splashes of white paint once I finished.  It definitely has the feel of a fountain coming back to life.

 

I also did a quick on-site sketch painting of Pegasus, back lit with slashes of sunlight across his body.  Not a great painting, but it was fun.

 

 

On our second visit, with Nancie’s class, I decided to sketch the fountain in the “Square” – a large square garden with sculpted hedges forming arabesque designs in the manner of formal gardens everywhere.  I briefly sat on the edge of the fountain to sketch, but was kicked off by a security guard.  Oh well, even as a senior I'm younger than the fountain itself.  

 

I also enjoyed this fountain, which somehow was supposed to represent air.  No idea how, it was four muscly young men posed to hold up some vaguely mountain-like structure, with lions between the nudes spouting water out of their mouths.  Muscly naked statues and lions spouting water just don’t say “air” to me.  But muscly nudes are fun to draw, even if they’re made of bronze or whatever metal – it’s a challenge to get the various poses right, to show bulging muscles and flesh in a quick series of pencil strokes.  Always fun, always a challenge.  I especially liked their reflection in the pool of water, below.  (A few strangers came by and saw my sketch as it developed – the process is drawing and shading with an aquarelle or watercolor pencil, then going over it with a wet brush to get the watercolor effect.  These random strangers complimented my work, all in Italian.  Of course, I would thank them in Italian as they said “Brava” or “Bellissima” or whatever.)

 

We’d seen several coffee vending machines on our various field trips, and I decided it was time to try them out.  So I had a macchiato con cioccolata – for just .50, half a Euro (about 50 cents).  Not too bad!

 

One of the women I became friendly with during the second class somehow got locked in her room on our first day – she knew the door handle was wonky, so she propped the door open with a rock.  But when she opened her window for the breeze and the view, the breeze somehow slammed her door shut, the handle fell off, and she was stuck in there.  We eventually heard her banging on the door and she was rescued, but our group started collecting stories of people getting locked in as we visited these various towns – and Villa Lante had its own story.

 

Somehow, someone got locked into the accessible bathroom near the entrance.  This happened while I was getting that vending machine coffee.  I used the facilities, got my coffee, came out to all sorts of commotion and banging on doors.  Someone ran to get the woman from the ticket booth, who wasn’t able to get the door to open.  She found some maintenance worker who also couldn’t get the door open.  We never did see if the person got out okay, but we told our locked-in person about it and all had a good laugh.

 

I also saw Fountain Man again, with the same yellow sweatshirt, same neon green tube and neon green shoe laces.  I nearly said "buon giorno" to him, but we never spoke previously, so it seemed silly.  Fountain Man will always remain an enigma.

On both visits to Villa Lante, our afternoons were spent at Lago Bolsena, supposedly the deepest lake in Europe.  Bolsena is in the caldera of a huge volcano – the mountainous part of the former volcano isn’t apparent, just this huge lake, which makes me wonder how huge this eruption must have been!

 

We went to the small fishing town of Marta, and had a picnic lunch in the lakeside park.  Our chefs at La Romita pack an Italian picnic lunch which always includes a sandwich, a salad of vegs and grain, fruit, sometimes a sweet, and a bottle of water and a bottle of wine for each person.  It’s a delightful tradition to have this lakeside picnic!

 

After lunch, we walked down to the beach, not even half a mile away, to draw and paint the boats hauled up on trailers along the beach.  The old town of Marta rises up behind the beach, and I played with various techniques to show the town, the row of olive trees, and the boats along the beach.  Just a suggestion of the scene, maybe to be developed later in a larger painting.  But still trying to work on Keiko’s blending technique, and also the dripping-splashing-splattering.  Of course, I also managed to get paint on myself as well as my shirt in addition to the paper.  Watercolor paint doesn’t always come out of fabric, which is why I travel with stain sticks, a bleach pen, as well as some Dawn dishwashing liquid which seems to take out most stains (other than tomato sauce).

 

But it was fun to sit by the water, watch the boats come and go, and see the fishermen – some actually walked out to boats in several feet of water!  Of course, they were wearing waders, but still, one would think they might walk out on the dock and then jump in the lake, rather than wading a hundred feet or so to get there!

 

A few of us also saw a nutria!  It looked like a beaver swimming in the water, and it climbed onto the shore where a few people were discussing a painting.  We didn’t want to scare the people with this odd animal at their feet, and fortunately it turned around and went back into the lake.  But the tail was most definitely not like a beaver, so we asked Alessandro, our friendly bus driver (for the second class I attended).  He looked it up with the Italian name, and showed us a picture - that was it exactly!!!  Wow, a nutria!  That was a first!

 

I probably should add that I told both Keiko and Nancie that I’m not a good student.  Part of it is that I’ve always been independent, and never needed a whole lot of instruction.  Part of it is that I taught art for twenty-five years, and am an experienced painter.  I was at La Romita to have time to paint, as well as explore Italy.  I wasn’t there for as much instruction as some (or many) of the other students needed.  So I did let them know that they didn’t need to worry about me too much.  Both instructors definitely added to my painting abilities in terms of technique as well as composition, and I found that enormously helpful.  And when I look at the body of work I produced in the three weeks – six 10 x 14" complete paintings, and half a sketchbook of drawings or quick paintings, I can definitely see growth and improvement.  I know I need more practice to learn how to create a controlled blur in watercolor.  

 

But as I said, I’m not a good student, and I didn’t want them to feel as if I were ignoring their demonstrations or their suggestions.  Nor did I want them to feel they needed to keep an eye on me, other than to make sure I made it back to the bus.

 

It turns out that La Romita also offers opportunities for independent artists to attend workshops, just without the instructor reviewing their artwork or including them in the “lessons” or demos.  So if I attend La Romita in the future, it may be more likely in that role, as an independent.

 

But I highly recommend La Romita to anyone who loves art and wants to learn more!  They definitely take really good care of their attendees!