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EXPATRIATES: THE FIRST FAMILY
SEVERAL TIMES A WEEK, I had occasion to walk across the Accademia Bridge, and whenever I did, I turned and looked down the Grand Canal toward the great domes of Santa Maria della Salute, easily one of the most familiar picture-postcard images of Venice.
Late one afternoon, as I was crossing the bridge and looking in this direction, I happened to notice an elegant motor launch idling quietly in front of a Gothic palace about sixty yards away, the second palace from the bridge on the St. Mark’s side. The boat was a venerable Riva, the doge of luxury motorboats. It was about forty years old, twenty feet long, and made of a rich mahogany trimmed in chrome. A tall man with gray hair stood at the wheel, holding his hand out to a woman who was stepping from the dock into the boat. She was dressed completely in white, from headband to shoes. Even her glasses had white frames, and her hair was white as well. After the woman had taken her seat, the man eased the boat out into the Grand Canal, stern first, as casually as if he were backing a car out of a garage. Then he turned and headed in the direction of the Salute Church and St. Mark’s.
I was struck by the idea that a ride on the Grand Canal in this motorboat, which would have been a thrill for me, was most likely a daily routine for this couple. They might have been going shopping, to dinner, or to visit friends. They moved around Venice not only in style but low to the water, the way Venetians had done for centuries, much closer to water level, at any rate, than if they had been standing on the deck of a lumbering vaporetto.
A week or so later, I saw the couple in their boat again. They were returning to the palace from the direction of the Rialto. As before, the woman was dressed completely in white, but this time she had on slacks instead of a skirt and a sweater instead of a blazer.
“That had to be Patricia Curtis,” Rose Lauritzen said later on. “She always wears white.”
“Always?” I asked. “Why?”
“I really don’t know. She’s worn white as long as I’ve known her. Peter, why does Patricia wear white?”
“I haven’t any idea,” said Peter.
“White may just be her color,” said Rose. “It’s probably as simple as that.”
“But now that you mention it,” said Peter, directing his comment to me, “I must tell you that Patricia Curtis is an interesting woman for many reasons, the very least of which is that she always wears white.”
“The man you saw her with is her husband, Carlo Viganò,” said Rose. “He’s terribly nice. They both are. I mean, really . . . nice . . . people.”
“Patricia Curtis,” said Peter, “is a fourth-generation American expatriate. Her great-grandparents, Daniel Sargent Curtis and Ariana Wormeley Curtis, came to Venice from Boston in the early 1880s with their son Ralph, Patricia’s grandfather.”
“Not only nice,” said Rose, “but well liked.”
“The Curtises,” said Peter, “were rich, old-line Bostonians, whose ancestry went back to the Mayflower. They bought Palazzo Barbaro, and their descendants have lived there ever since.”
“Carlo has a business in Malaysia,” said Rose. “Manufacturing. I forget what.”
“In terms of seniority,” said Peter, “the Curtises are way ahead of all the other English-speaking expatriates in Venice. They’re in a class by themselves.”
“Tablecloths and napkins!” said Rose. “That’s what he makes. Carlo’s company, I mean.”
“But why would a rich, socially prominent Bostonian pack up his family and leave America for good?” I asked.
“Aha!” said Peter. “That’s the curious part.”
Peter went on to explain that Daniel Curtis was riding in a commuter train from Boston to the suburbs when he got into an altercation with another man over a seat that had been saved for a third party. Words were exchanged. The other man declared that Daniel Curtis was “no gentleman,” and in reply Mr. Curtis twisted the man’s nose. The injured party turned out to be a judge, who thereupon brought suit against Daniel Curtis for assault. A trial followed, and Daniel Curtis was convicted and sentenced to two months in jail. Upon his release, according to the story, he indignantly gathered up his family, moved to Europe, and never came back.
“It is only fair to point out,” said Peter, “that in all the years he lived in Venice, Daniel Curtis behaved like a consummate gentleman. From the moment he and Ariana set foot in Palazzo Barbaro, they made it a gathering place for the best-known, most-admired artists, writers, and musicians of their day. Robert Browning read his poetry aloud to the Curtises and their guests. Henry James, a frequent houseguest, used the Barbaro as the model for the fictional Palazzo Leporelli in his masterpiece The Wings of the Dove. John Singer Sargent was a distant cousin, and when he was visiting the Barbaro, he painted in the top-floor studio of his cousin, Ralph Curtis, who was also an accomplished painter. Monet painted views of Santa Maria della Salute from the Barbaro’s water gate. Are you getting the picture?”
“I am,” I said.
“The Curtis family occupies a permanent place in the cultural history of nineteenth-century Venice. Their salon became known as the ‘Barbaro Circle,’ and it included James McNeill Whistler, William Merritt Chase, Edith Wharton, and Bernard Berenson.”
“And that madwoman from Boston,” said Rose, “Mrs. Gardner.”
“Isabella Stewart Gardner,” said Peter, “the eccentric Boston art collector, rented the piano nobile from the Curtises for several summers while she was acquiring important paintings for the museum she intended to build in Boston.”
“She not only rented the Barbaro,” said Rose, “she copied it!”
“True,” said Peter. “She built her Boston museum in the form of a Venetian palace, based loosely on the façade of Palazzo Barbaro. One can easily see why Mrs. Gardner was so inspired. The Barbaro is one of the most important fifteenth-century Gothic palaces in Venice. Actually, it’s two palaces. The Barbaro family bought the palace next to it in the late seventeenth century to provide themselves with a ballroom.
“One could go on and on about Palazzo Barbaro’s architectural and decorative grace notes, but my point is that Patricia Curtis is, first and foremost, the inheritor and guardian of a considerable literary, artistic, and architectural patrimony. She is also, but only very incidentally, a woman who wears white.”
ON THE TELEPHONE, Patricia Curtis was reserved but friendly. She was leaving the next day, she said, for Malaysia, where her husband was part owner of a textile mill. However, if I could wait until her return a month later, she would be happy to show me Palazzo Barbaro.
Over the next few weeks, I educated myself about the Barbaro. I found a videotape of Brideshead Revisited and watched the Venetian episode, in which Laurence Olivier plays the aging Lord Marchmain, living in self-imposed exile in a sumptuous Venetian palace. Palazzo Barbaro had been used for the filming of those scenes. Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews (as Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte) climb an exterior stairway to the piano nobile, saunter down the length of the polished terrazzo floor of the portego, and find Olivier standing at a window in the ballroom, looking out at the Grand Canal.
I reread The Wings of the Dove, keeping in mind that Henry James had been describing these same rooms as he wrote of the angelic, dying Milly Theale ensconced in the “palatial chambers” of her “great gilded shell.”
As for Daniel Curtis’s nose-twisting attack on Judge Churchill, accounts of it had appeared in a number of books, including Cleveland Amory’s The Proper Bostonians, but they varied considerably. Amory’s version had Daniel Curtis twisting a man’s nose so violently he was disfigured for life. Another report said Curtis had bitten the nose of a streetcar driver; another had him knocking down a policeman who had insulted his wife; yet another claimed that the argument had been about giving a seat to a pregnant woman. The incident had taken on the character of a folk tale, changing with each telling. This may have been because Mrs. Curtis had revised the story in order to put her husband in a better l
ight. In any case, the real story had been reported in minute detail by the Boston newspapers, which reprinted verbatim transcripts of court testimony.
The confrontation had started when Judge Churchill took a seat being saved for another man, but it quickly turned into an argument about the bulky luggage—a carpetbag and a toy wagon—that Churchill placed on the floor in the tight space between himself and Daniel Curtis. The objects pressed against Curtis’s legs, to his great annoyance, and Curtis brusquely told him to move them, which Churchill did. Moments later the third man arrived and claimed his seat, whereupon Churchill quickly got up and surrendered it. But before walking away, he leaned toward Daniel Curtis and said, in a low voice, “If you are a gentleman, I have never seen one before.”
Stung by the remark, Curtis jumped up, demanded to know who Churchill was, and twisted his nose (“in a moderate and quiet manner,” he later claimed). Churchill then angrily declared, “Nobody but a blackguard would begin a fight in the presence of these ladies!” upon which Daniel Curtis hit him in the face, breaking his glasses.
Curtis was hauled into court, tried for assault, convicted, and sentenced to two months in jail.
The astonishing part is what happened next: More than three hundred of the leading citizens of Massachusetts petitioned the governor to issue a pardon for Daniel Curtis. Among the signers were Harvard president Charles Eliot; future Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell; the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court; the secretary of state of Massachusetts; the president of the Union Pacific Railroad; the naturalist Louis Agassiz; Charles Eliot Norton, who was Harvard’s and America’s first professor of fine arts; the historian Francis Parkman; the painter William Morris Hunt; the architect H. H. Richardson; the husband of Isabella Stewart Gardner (John L. Gardner); and an all-star roster of Boston blue-bloods, including Lowells, Saltonstalls, Adamses, Welds, Lawrences, Otises, Endicotts, Pierces, Parkers, Cushings, Minots, Appletons, and Crowninshields, to name just a few.
The story took an even stranger turn when Daniel Curtis then repudiated their petition by refusing to sign it. He likewise rejected Judge Churchill’s offer to drop the charges in exchange for a sincere apology. Curtis said his own actions had been justified, given Churchill’s provocations, and that he would not apologize. So Daniel Sargent Curtis spent the next two months in jail.
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.”