Images from Villa Contarini

Baroque landscape and a bit of iconography, from Piazzola sul Brenta, Italy!

Dear reader, this week is the Easter holiday in Italy, and Daniela’s mom is visiting us; plus, we are trying to get our instruments ready to be played in two weeks. We are late with the promised translation from the “Orologio del piacere”, the account of a party at Villa Contarini. So this week, we are sharing with you some pics of the villa so you can anticipate and get ready for the atmosphere of the festivities that we will describe in our following newsletter.

As we previously mentioned,

What’s up in the next weeks?

Was it in a world upside-down that the cello was played “da spalla”?

the villa consists of a central squared room where the big gatherings took place and two wings, no less than 180 mts long, consisting of a long corridor with many small rooms where guests could share gossip and arrange business or political meetings.

Imagine the amazement of the guests approaching the villa…

These rooms were covered with frescoes, aiming to show the grandeur of Venice. Most of the subjects have exotic subjects because the power of Venice came from the sea, from exploration and commerce. The frescoes are not artistic relevant; they were all made in two months. The villa was used only during the summer when the town of Venice was too hot to have a pleasant stay there. To avoid the important guests escaping elsewhere, Marco Contarini decided to build this villa and to build it in a very short time! These frescoes aimed to entertain guests, showing marvellous things and animals from exotic worlds, illustrating the entertainments available in the property (hunting parties, gatherings), and some other rooms, in which only a frame was frescoed, served as showrooms for laces, tapestries, silks and other merchandising.

The stunning view of the piazza from the villa, and the long corridor

Wonderful five-string cello in this fresco: look at how the strings seem to get bigger, getting lower like they were all gut strings, and how they are flexible getting out of the pegbox!

Other musical iconography

The only music we found there were these two parchments used to bind 19th-century account books.

They serve good tramezzini at the bar in front of the villa!

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In next week's issue, we will describe and translate some parts of the pamphlet “Orologio del piacere”, an account of the many days of entertainment in honour of an important guest who arrived during August 1685. Stay tuned!

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Updates from our workshop

This week Alessandro is finishing and cleaning the body of the cello before setting in the neck, while Daniela is making fingerboards for the two da spalla cellos! We are having a rainy Easter weekend but still we enjoy walks with our dogs (the third one is Daniela’s mother’s dog).

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Featured video of the week

Musical offer, from J.S. Bach and the great and only Sigiswald Kuijken at the Violoncello da Spalla. Enjoy!