Curtis did not leave America in indignation as soon as he was released. He left eight years later. In fact, his jail term had had nothing to do with his leaving. He had expressed a desire to emigrate long before the nose-twisting incident. Ironically, his reason had been his unhappiness about the decline in civility in America. In a letter to his sister, written in 1863, six years before his confrontation with Judge Churchill, he had complained that “American gentlemen are not exactly gentlemen. . . . [They have] a want of thorough self-contained self-respect, which belongs to men who are born gentlemen of good ancestors, educated properly, with sufficient estate and who know for certain their place and that of others. . . . I do wish I had the means of quitting this land forever with my children.”
Daniel Curtis’s disenchantment with America was a sentiment shared by many people of his class at the time. It was in part a reaction to the social upheavals brought on by the Civil War and in part an alarmed response to the arrival of the first wave of immigrants from Ireland, who had little in common with long-established Americans. In any case, if Daniel Curtis had been irritated by Judge Churchill’s thoughtlessness in cramming his baggage between the two of them, he would have found it intolerable to then be called ungentlemanly by the selfsame lout.
When Daniel and Ariana moved into the Barbaro, they took possession of a palace that had been renowned as a center of humanist intellectual discourse for the four centuries it was occupied by the Barbaro family. The Barbaros had been true Renaissance men: scholars, philosophers, mathematicians, diplomats, scientists, politicians, military commanders, church patriarchs, and patrons of the arts. The best remembered was the sixteenth-century Daniele Barbaro, a diplomat, philosopher, architectural translator of Vitruvius. Daniele Barbaro hired Andrea Palladio to design his summer estate—the Villa Barbaro at Maser—and engaged Veronese to paint the frescoes. When he sat for his portrait, Titian painted it.
Palazzo Barbaro remained the Barbaro family’s exclusive domain until the defeat and subsequent impoverishment of Venice at the hands of Napoleon. As their fortune dwindled, the Barbaros withdrew into a wing of the palace and divided the rest into apartments. When the last of the Barbaros died in the middle of the nineteenth century, the palace was bought by a succession of speculators, who stripped it of many of its paintings, hacked off carved marble figures, gathered up choice furniture and decorative items, and put them up for auction.
Daniel and Ariana Curtis became its saviors. They replaced rotting timbers, repaired broken stucco, and restored frescoes and paintings. By creating their own cultural salon in the Barbaro, they even revived its humanist spirit. With the Curtises playing host to artists, writers, and musicians, Palazzo Barbaro came to be considered the most important American cultural outpost in Venice, if not in all of Italy. That was due in part to the profound influence of a gray eminence who remained largely behind the scenes—namely, Charles Eliot Norton, one of Daniel Curtis’s Harvard classmates. An early appreciator of Italian art, Norton was a friend and literary executor of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, a translator of Dante’s
Divine Comedy,
a founder of the
Nation,
a teacher of Bernard Berenson and Ralph Curtis, and a friend and mentor to Henry James, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and others in the Barbaro Circle. (It was during one of Professor Norton’s lectures in January 1876 that Ralph Curtis slipped a note to a fellow student inviting him to come to the room of a friend after class; they were going to start a college humor magazine along the lines of
Punch.
A few weeks later, Ralph Curtis and six of his friends published the first issue of the
Harvard Lampoon.
)
Because of their obvious devotion to Palazzo Barbaro and their energetic support of artists and the arts, the Curtises inspired an outpouring of goodwill in Venice that was so deeply felt it carried over to succeeding generations. Alberto Franchetti, whose family once owned the palace next door to the Barbaro, recalled that when he was growing up, long after Daniel and Ariana had died, the Curtis family was still regarded with admiration and gratitude.
“You have to understand,” Franchetti said, “that they came to Venice at the lowest point in our history, when everyone was extremely poor and in despair. The Curtises were the one bright light in Venice at a very dark time. They did more than restore Palazzo Barbaro, they honored it, and for this they won the lasting affection of Venice. Today we think of the Curtises as part of our history, and for foreigners this is a rare distinction. They are not Venetians, but we don’t think of them as expatriates either. We see the Curtises as unique.”
There was every reason to expect that future generations of Curtises would continue to live in and safeguard the Barbaro, inheriting that same goodwill. But a problem had arisen.
For the first time in over a hundred years, the Curtis family was in danger of losing control of the Barbaro.
The source of the trouble lay in a provision of the Napoleonic Code, which was law in Italy: namely, that children shall inherit equal shares of their parents’ property. That rule was thought to be more equitable than the British law of primogeniture, which allows the eldest son to inherit the entire estate. But in practical terms, the Napoleonic Code contributed to ferocious quarrels among heirs and to the breakup of large family properties.
Patricia and her two siblings, Ralph and Lisa, had inherited Palazzo Barbaro in the mid-1980s. Their mother had left it to them in equal shares, as required by the code, but her will did not specify which part of the palace would belong to whom. That question was left for the three heirs to settle among themselves.
Patricia, the eldest, was the only one of the three who lived in the Barbaro full-time. Lisa had married a Frenchman, lived in Paris, and was now la comtesse de Beaumont. Ralph was divorced from his French wife and also lived in Paris.
“We tried everything,” said Lisa, “every possible formula. We even thought of dividing the palace in thirds vertically, which would have given each of us an apartment on an upper floor and that part of the
piano nobile
that lay below. But it would have meant separating the
salone
from the
portego,
and the superintendent of fine arts would never have allowed it. In the end, we shared joint ownership of the
piano nobile
and took apartments elsewhere in the palace.”
As everyone knows, in any palace, the
piano nobile
is the grandest floor by far. It has the highest ceilings, the tallest windows, and the stateliest balconies. It is the floor where, for centuries, the money has been spent on such appurtenances as frescoed ceilings, wall-size paintings, gigantic chandeliers, and wave upon wave of sculpted stucco mounted above the doors, framing the paintings, surging across the ceilings. In some people’s minds, the
piano nobile
is not merely the most valuable floor of a palace, it
is
the palace. In other words, if a person owned only that one floor, people tended to speak of the palace as
his
palace. Daniel Curtis had bought the top three floors of the Barbaro. Even though the two floors below were owned and occupied by other people, there was never any question that the Barbaro belonged to the Curtises, because they owned the
piano nobile.
In some quarters it was even known as “Palazzo Barbaro-Curtis.”
The preeminence of the Barbaro’s
piano nobile
over the other floors was especially pronounced, because it was the only floor that extended through both palaces. The other floors were all at different levels, so each was confined within the Gothic part or the baroque part. At ten thousand square feet, the
piano nobile
was not only much bigger than the other floors, it included the greatest prize of all—the grand ballroom with its monumental paintings and sumptuous swirls of stucco, a room of such elegance and majestic proportions that it was featured in virtually every photo book on Venetian palaces.
Because Patricia was the only one of the three Curtis siblings who lived in the Barbaro, she was also the only one who made regular use of the
piano nobile—
for receptions, parties, or as an incomparable guest flat. She looked after it with loving care, attending to its needs, while her sister and brother had barely any interest in it. Nevertheless, as joint owners, all three were obliged to make financial contributions to its maintenance.
“When the windows in the rear needed to be replaced,” said Lisa, “we had to follow the guidelines of the superintendent of monuments, and it cost a hundred million lire [fifty thousand dollars]. When chairs need recovering, we can’t use just any cloth. It has to be Fortuny. And the floors must be cleaned and polished properly, according to curatorial standards, because after all the Barbaro is a museum.”
As time went on, with the value of the
piano nobile
rising year by year to something over $6 million, Lisa and Ralph increasingly viewed it as a burdensome luxury. They wanted to sell, and the issue became emotionally charged. Patricia strongly resisted, and for a time they tried to make the
piano nobile
pay for its own upkeep by renting it out for private parties at a fee of $10,000 or more. But the parties also eventually became a source of disagreement among the Curtises, and they came to an abrupt halt.
The prospect of handing the
piano nobile
down to the next generation of Curtises loomed as an even thornier problem and only stiffened Lisa’s resolve to sell. Ralph was divorced and childless, but Patricia had one son and one grandchild, and Lisa had two sons and six grandchildren. Word had it that now, with the alternatives exhausted, Patricia had finally, reluctantly, given in to the two-to-one vote and agreed to put the
piano nobile
on the market. Prospective buyers were already coming to have a look. It was only a matter of time.
IT OCCURRED TO ME that the sale of the Barbaro might move faster than expected and that my visit might become an unwanted complication. In an idle moment, I looked in the telephone directory for the phone numbers of the other Curtises and found a listing for Ralph. I had intended at some point to seek him out anyway. What would be the harm?
After three rings, a recorded male voice said in American-accented English, “You have reached the Earth liaison station of the Democratic Republic of the Planet Mars.”
I hung up, checked the number, and dialed again. The same voice answered with the same message and went on to declare that “qualified scholars will be admitted to the archives by appointment only. If you leave pertinent information, the librarian will return your call.” I left my name and telephone number and said I was trying to reach Ralph Curtis at Palazzo Barbaro. Two hours later, Ralph Curtis called.
“I thought I’d dialed the wrong number,” I said.
“Well, you know we’re inundated by people doing research on Henry James or John Singer Sargent or Tiepolo,” he said. “It can be such a bore. They ask ridiculous questions. I could care less whether Henry James wore a bow tie or a cravat when he wrote
The Aspern Papers.
”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “So all that business about the Democratic Republic of the Planet Mars is just a ruse to put the academics off the scent.”
“Well, no,” he said. “That happens to be real.”
“Ah . . .” I said, becoming wary.
“How do you feel about peace and nuclear disarmament?” he asked.
“I’m for it,” I said, weighing my words.
“Good,” he said, “because that’s the mission of the Barbaro Project.”
“The Barbaro Project?”
“World peace and nuclear disarmament. We’re in touch with the heads of state of all the terrestrial nuclear powers. Our goal is to get them to surrender their nuclear fire codes to us so we can put them on a spaceship and blast them off to Mars, where they won’t be able to get at them. What do you think of that?”
“It’s a noble cause,” I said. “But you keep saying ‘we.’ Who’s in this with you?”
“Well, it’s basically me. But I’ve talked to a lot of people, like you, who think it’s a good idea.”
I took advantage of a pause in the conversation to explain my reason for calling. I mentioned my interest in the Barbaro, the Barbaro Circle, and life in the palace during five generations of Curtises. “Would it be possible,” I asked, “to visit Palazzo Barbaro?”