On the other hand, there are those who feel ashamed of their peasant roots and see the garden as a means of expressing their arrival in the stylish world of office jobs, high tech and magazine-inspired domestic environments. In which case they attempt to reconstruct the traditional ornamental garden of the Italian aristocracy: dwarf cypresses, oleanders, religious statuettes and tiny stone paths, spiced up perhaps with a variety of exotic plants some garden centre is passing off as fashionable and which haven’t a hope of surviving the cold Veneto winter. Once everything is planted and growing, such people don’t play in their gardens as an English family might. They tend them, brush them and sweep them like some never-to-be-used front room, the way other people are forever cleaning cars they never take out of their garages. Until, with the sombre smell of the cypresses and a curious stony stasis of upright trees and crisscross flagging, the status-symbol garden begins to look like a little cemetery without the graves (but waiting for those of its owners perhaps). And house after house along Via Colombare, garden after garden, decorous little cemeteries alternate with vigorous pea and cabbage patches as each capofamiglia declares his particular response to the profound change that has taken place, the loss of that old obviousness that the land was for food which you needed to survive.
Vegetable garden, cemetery; chained dogs in the first, a Siamese cat perhaps in the second; nervous animals in uncertain patches of green marooned by the lava flow from the city as it solidifies day by day in streets and wrought-iron fences. The tall tall fences of Montecchio, la fortuna del fabbro, the blacksmith’s jackpot. Nowhere, nowhere does one find that happy, relaxed, cosy, ad hoc floweriness of the suburban English garden. It must be one of the only areas of domestic civilisation where the British win hands down.
Lucilla and Vittorina were nostalgic for a peasant past. Understandably. They wanted those tomatoes and peperoni, lettuce and radicchio rosso too. But Lucilla was fat and lazy. And a little ashamed. She drew the line at vines, for example, and was famous for having torn down with her own hands an attractive filare that Vittorina’s husband had set up. What’s more, if there was a vegetable patch, it must be away from the road, secluded from the casual glance of passers-by. After all, the house itself was so stylish with its pretentious Californian eaves, graffiato finish, and big terrace balconies, gave such an impression of having arrived, it would be a crime to disabuse the passer-by with some humble salad crop.
So a thin strip of land away from the road and immediately beneath the wall of Negretti’s house and terrace turned out to be the only place for productive cultivation. This annoyed Vittorina, who did the lion’s share of work in the garden and got some real sense of recreation from it. It annoyed her because the ground below Negretti’s three-storey windowless wall got no sunshine, little rain and was full of snails, indeed teeming with them. They bred in the unkept clutter and cracked cement of Negretti’s terrace and then slithered down three metres of damp brickwork in the night to stake out number 10’s lettuces and peas. So Vittorina would far rather have had a sunny patch over towards the road, to feel the sun warm on her back in the early morning as she tied up her tomatoes. She didn’t care about the impression this would give to the neighbours, as she didn’t care about being seen carrying out her dirty dishwater; she had none of Lucilla’s obsession with social status.
But a difference of opinion between Vittorina and Lucilla was easily resolved. Lucilla stamped her small, fat high-heeled foot and, aside from a little dark muttering of a saint’s name here and the Virgin’s there, Vittorina inevitably succumbed. Along with her peasant’s attachment to salad and vegetables, she also had the peasant’s age-old submission, to master and bad weather. With her never perfectly plucked moustache and fierce temper, Lucilla resembled both.
No, the real problem with the garden in Via Colombare was that of integrating the old ladies’ earthy mix of nostalgia and shame with the younger Visentini’s more sophisticated, media-based, urban vision: an English lawn, shady trees, and, yes, a vegetable patch (because Giampaolo is a gourmet and fresh greens are tastier), but run along ecological, natural-food lines (because Giampaolo, like any modern man, is also something of a Green). Thus Vittorina not only had to work the communal vegetable patch under the tall bare wall of Negretti’s grim house but, to add to her troubles, she wasn’t allowed to poison the quite multitudinous snails. It all came out in the food, her younger neighbour scared her. We would all die of cancer.
And that was one battle Giampaolo won. Indeed, whenever Vittorina took up a position on something it was always clear she was going to lose. A bulky, heavy-breathing woman, she prayed a great deal, had Masses said for her husband, visited the cemetery almost daily and subscribed to such periodicals as I miracoli di Sant’Antonio and La salvezza. Her face had a morose wisdom which would occasionally light up in genuine friendliness. One suspected she was already resigned to losing the quarrels of this world, banking on the next. A pushover for the persuasive, courteous and always well-informed Giampaolo.
However, since Giampaolo only rented his flat, whereas the others owned, when it came to getting trees or bushes for the garden proper, Lucilla insisted on choosing and locating them herself (Giampaolo was quick to disclaim responsibility). The result was one of the very saddest collections of dwarf cypresses and ornamental mutants imaginable, unhealthy things picked up in sales and planted apparently at random across two hundred square metres of dry lawn. A funereal tone was everywhere apparent and, indeed, it occurred to us that Lucilla had probably never been into a garden that wasn’t a cemetery. There were no gardens in her poverty-stricken youth and most of her life had been spent operating an industrial cleaning business from a small suburban flat. Whereas the early death of her husband and various relatives had made her all too familiar with cemeteries.
To her credit, Lucilla was aware that something was wrong with the garden at number 10, aware that this gloomy assortment of dull evergreens was not really what she was after. In the hope of achieving some improbable rightness, she would thus, Giampaolo explained, move the trees about year after year, dig one up, shift it a metre or two this way, dig up another, swop it with yet another, put this one in the shade, move that one out of it, and so on and so forth, so that the weary plants became sadder and sadder while the business of mowing the lawn in Via Colombare now involved a dizzy weaving back and forth through the lost labour of Lucilla’s search for harmony.
And of course the lawn had to be mowed regularly. Giampaolo was strict about this. Regularly and very low. Because it had to be an English lawn, as the Italians imagine English lawns to be, an extension, that is, of the meticulous formal elegance of the Visentini’s flat, licked clean from top to bottom day in day out with sacrificial anality. Yes, Giampaolo said at our first condominium meeting when my duties were outlined, the lawn had to be mowed twice or three times a week from spring through autumn and the cuttings had to be gathered with a rake and piled on a compost heap in the most hidden corner of the garden where shameful things like compost heaps are piled. It should be said here, in Giampaolo’s defence, that most surrounding gardeners of the cemetery variety just had their grass taken away by the refuse men, and this was the easy solution that Lucilla, if not Vittorina, would undoubtedly have plumped for. But being a Green, Giampaolo rightly insisted that grass was a limited resource to be husbanded and utilised — along the snail-infested wall …