02The Macaronic Dream of Casa Girasole

Marco Frascari

I remember the first time I saw Casa Girasole. It was during the cherry

season, at the end of my final year of high school. My father, knowing that

I planned to go on to study architecture, and having heard from a friend

about an amazing summer retreat, a rotary villa, took me there one

Sunday afternoon. Before lunch we had gone to nearby Lonigo to see

Vincenzo Scamozzi’s youthful masterpiece, the splendid and solitary Rocca

Pisana.1 Rocca Pisana was not conceived as a home to live in, but was more

a retreat for relaxation and contemplation during the long hot days of

summer. With its central domed space, it was also, on a higher level, a

built expression of Renaissance cosmology. When I saw Casa Girasole, I

realised it too was a cosmological machine, while Rocca Pisana was in turn

a rotating villa. I felt, intuitively, that there was no big difference between

the two. Both villas were machines, one rotating physically and the other

virtually. Both resulted from the merging of three arts: the arts of living

well, building well and thinking well. Several years later my intuition was

confirmed when I came across a sectional drawing of Villa Bardellini, the

plan of which is very similar to Rocca Pisana. The drawing shows the

tracings of sunlight and shadows circling all around the villa and entering

directly from every opening, even from the north, although a Rose of the

Winds clearly marks the orientation of the villa towards the sun.2

Rocca Pisana and Casa Girasole are emotive edifices in the tradition of

the Veneto villa. They are cosmological representations that transgress the

barrier separating material and immaterial existence, to create an

intimate relation between men and gods. Of paramount importance to the

cosmological representation is the sense of a motor force linking human

action to a divine destiny. As Palladio persuasively states in the Foreword

to the First Book of his treatise, this motor force can be supplied by singular

buildings, emphatic and distinctive products of individual expression,

aggregating to make a possible cosmos:

I thought it would be most appropriate to begin with singular

houses (case particolari); for it is plausible that they supplied the

models for public buildings, since it is very likely that

man previously lived by himself, and then, seeing that he needed

the help of other men in providing those things which would

make him happy (if happiness can be found down here), he quite

naturally longed for and loved the company of other men: so they

formed settlements from a number of houses and from settlements

cities in which were public places and buildings.3

Above: Vincenzo Scamozzi,Villa Bardellini, Monfumo,1594, from L’Ideadell’Architettura Universale. Left: Thomas Diges, A PerfitDescription of the Caelestial Orbes,1576. Dating from the sameyear that Rocca Pisana wasbuilt, the chart epitomises anew conception of nature, with the sun at the centre ofthe orbiting planets, and thepreviously fixed sphere of starsbroken to create an infinitecosmos.

03

In their form and in their making, the two villas echo this suave view

of the cosmos. They are microcosms mirroring the macrocosm;

machineries for edification. The intrinsically cosmological nature of the

machine is described by Daniele Barbaro in his 1556 translation and

critical edition of Vitruvius’s On Architecture – a text that Scamozzi admits

to having read several times.4

First, every machine is born from the nature of things, and is

controlled by the masterly courses of the heavens. Considering the

continuous (continuata) nature of the Sun, Moon and the other five

stars, if the machine did not rotate then we would not have light

on earth and the ripeness of fruits … and in the many convenient

things surrounding life.5

Barbaro writes that a machine is an amalgam of ‘force and imagination

(fantasia)’; it is the result of the art of thinking well, of ‘the thinking …that

makes us devise machinations (il pensiero… che ci fa macchinare)’.6

The idea of the building as a stunning apparatus, a man-made echo of

the cosmic order, is restated by Andrea Palladio in the preface to the Fourth

Book of his treatise:

Indeed if we consider what a beautiful machine the world is,

the marvellous embellishments with which it is filled, and how

the heavens change the seasons of the world by their continuous

revolutions according to the demands of nature and how they

maintain themselves by the suave harmony of their measured

movements, we cannot doubt that … these small temples which

we build must be similar to this vast one which He, with boundless

generosity, perfected with but a word of command.7

Furthermore, in his guide to the antiquities of Rome, Palladio again uses

the expression ‘macchina del Mondo’ in describing Nero’s Domus Aurea:

The main hall was round and was turning constantly, akin to the

machine of the world.8

Palladio’s own best-known macchina is the Villa Rotonda, a summer

hideaway on the outskirts of Vicenza. In his treatise, Palladio points out

that it sits amid hills ‘which resemble a vast theatre’.9 The villa can be seen

04

as the axle of the machine of the world, rotating virtually through its

quadripartite symmetry.

At the time of that first visit to Casa Girasole, I knew little about

Veneto architecture but was an avid reader of a contemporary of Palladio,

Teofilo Folengo.10 It was Folengo who instilled in me an enthusiasm for the

Macaronic art, so called from macaroni, an ancient savoury foodstuff

‘bound together with flour, cheese and butter, which is fat, coarse and

rustic (quoddam pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum rude,

et rusticanum)’.11 Macaronic thinking conceives of infinite possible worlds

whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, that have

no beginning and no end. By means of intuition, individuals can harness

these infinite worlds. Through their changing corporeal presence, they can

define their core, creating an intelligible sphere. Adopting a typical

Renaissance image, this sphere can be seen as a zucca (pumpkin) – as a

head, an empty container, or both: an inhabitable intellectual sphere.12

Towards the end of Folegno’s mock epic masterpiece Baldus, the

eponymous hero and his companions, a group of young outlaws fleeing

from the small village of Cipada, make a final descent into Hell. There they

find an enormous dried up pumpkin, big enough, had it still been squashy

and edible, to make a soup (minestra) to feed the entire world. The hollow

pumpkin is filled with fraudsters, with those who propagate fables and

cultivate vanities: philosophers, poets, singers, astrologers. In the

pumpkin, they are punished: for every lie they have told while they were

alive, demons pull out a tooth; and as each tooth is pulled, a new one

erupts in its place. At this point, Folengo interrupts the narration and

inserts himself into the tale to affirm: ‘the pumpkin is my fatherland

(zucca mihi patria est)’. Baldus and his friends can go on to defeat the

demons, but Folengo will halt in machina grandis of his Parnassus, the

cosmological machine of the zucca.

Macaronic thinking takes an ironic view of political, religious and

visual beliefs grounded in customs and cultures that are vitiated by

prejudice. Informed by an open-ended and cynical universal negation, it

takes humour to the point of absurdity through its stylistic and diachronic

twists. Macaronic thinkers are not revolutionaries, but are purveyors of a

permanent contestation, one that goes beyond any specific political,

religious or moral polemic to lay siege to the foundations of our

comprehension and representation of the world. The Macaronic pulverises

and dissolves into nothingness any abuse of reason resulting from

fraudulent words, but at the same time constructs possibilities for dreams.

Zucca caption please

65

The palace of King Hugh is a pneumatic apparatus, with a nielloed silver

pilaster at its centre,19 whereas Folengo’s cloister is a motorised device,

generating bizarre noises that draw Baldus towards the centre of the

rotating apparatus.

One hears nothing other than the murmur produced by the

building. Baldus’s objective is to locate the source of the

hammering, therefore, seeing a stair, a nautilus spiral, he begins

to climb it, but he continues to rotate as before, and his circular

motion is doubled because the whole machine rotates and carries

the stairs with it while the stairs in turn rotate and carry the steps.20

At the centre of the rotary theatre, Baldus finds the astral court of

Manto, legendary founder of the city of Mantua. His helicoidal movement

up the stair is an ascent from the terrestrial dimension of the sublunar

world to the heptenary sequence of Ptolemaic cosmology. At the top of the

rotating cloister he enters a vision of the Ptolemaic machine of the seven

spheres, beginning with the Moon manufactured in bronze and ending

with Saturn fabricated in lead – an allegoric celebration of alchemy.

Folengo does not think of the mythic and the scientific as opposing

discourses. Rather, his works invite us to extract the abstract and

philosophical message hidden in the allegory, a process that is itself quite

rational. Alchemy is thinking with materials, whereas chemistry is

thinking about materials. Alchemy, in its most traditional interpretation,

is nothing other than the human ability to transform ‘inanimate’ matter

into potent substances.

Invernizzi’s motto – were he to have had one – could have been ‘With

Reinforced Concrete A Mechanical Precision Can Be Achieved’.21 He was an

alchemist of that material and its structural possibilities. In Casa Girasole,

by perfectly balancing elasticity and tension, he transforms the traditional

static leadenness of reinforced concrete into a golden materiality of

dynamic loads.

There is a further point that reinforces the case for the Macaronic

nature of this building. Invernizzi brought together a trinity of

collaborators – architect Ettore Fagiuoli, interior decorator Fausto

Saccarotti, and mechanical engineer Romolo Carapacchi – to make his

villa a compound of gravitas, levitas and vanitas. Gravitas is expressed in the

base of the building, in the entry and the ostentatious arcade designed by

Fagiuoli; levitas in the structural vierendeels and machinery; and vanitas in

Macaronic thinking is a monstrous technique: a constructive dream

that when applied to the built world reveals that the architecture is still

and always will be sustainable, flexible and fertile. So, when I visited Casa

Girasole, I did not make the facile connection between it and the health-

orientated architecture of the period, as epitomised by the buildings of the

Fascist Colonie, configured to draw maximum benefit from the sun. Instead,

with the reading of Baldus fresh in my mind, it occurred to me that the

designer of this rotating construction, the Veronese engineer Angelo

Invernizzi, was under a Macaronic influence. The most likely source of this

influence: the remarkable writings of the contemporaneous Veronese

historian Luigi Messedaglia (1874–1974), who was a great Folengo scholar.13

Of course, this mental leap owed more to imagination than ingenuity

(Folengo’s Macaronic technique of phantasia … plus quam phantastica).

At the centre of Casa Girasole, in its axis mundi, a spiral stair rises in a

tower topped by an elegant lantern. When I saw it, I immediately thought

of the fantastic and bizarre episode of Baldus’s visit to the rocky island of

Manto. Going through a grotto, our hero and his companions come upon

an extraordinary astronomical and alchemical structure, a square

surrounded by an arcade of bronze binary columns supporting silver

arches. This metallic cloister rotates upon itself, like the celestial spheres

rotate. Or better, as Folengo states (bringing the analogy into the

Macaronic realm of the infraordinary), it turns around like the threading

spools used by the spinners in Modena and Bologna. Folengo defines this

bizarre construction as a revolving theatre and a machine of the world.14

The model for it appears to be a description of the astonishing palace of

’Hugh the Strong’, King of Constantinople.15

The palace was vaulted and closed at its summit

And built with the use of the compass and nobly finished …

If from the sea, the Northwestern, the Northern

or any other wind blows

Striking the palace from the western side

It causes it to rotate rapidly and continuously

Like the wheel of a cart going downhill.16

The source of Hugh’s palace has been traced in turn to the cosmological

room in Nero’s Domus Aurea mentioned earlier.17 In The Lives of the Caesars,

Suetonius describes this room as ‘constantly rotating day and night, like

the heavens (perpetuo diebus ac noctibus vice mundi circumageretur)’.18

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Casa Girasole can be further understood through the critical swivelling

lens of a modern Macaronic writer, Carlo Emilio Gadda, who was a

contemporary of Angelo Invernizzi.23 An ‘elusive author’, as William

Weaver called him,24 Gadda provides a key to tackling this Macaronic

question of architecture. As an engineer, he had very precise ideas about

architecture. As a writer, he described a cosmological view in which every

element of a system contains within it another system, and each

individual system is in turn linked to a genealogy of systems.

Italo Calvino begins ‘Multiplicity’, the fifth of his Six Memos for the

Next Millennium, by quoting extensively from Gadda’s That Awful Mess on

the Via Merulana. He points out that Gadda represents ‘the world as a knot,

a tangled skein of yarn… without in the least diminishing its inextricable

complexity’.25 His method of knowledge, his ‘encyclopedism’, works by

multiplying around its starting point, encompassing ever vaster horizons

until, if allowed to continue, it would end by embracing the entire

universe. To formulate this point, Calvino quickly summarises two

short texts.

For example Gadda’s recipe for ‘Risotto alla Milanese’… is a

masterpiece of Italian prose and practical advice in his description

of grains of rice still partly in their husk (‘pericarps’, as he calls

them), the most appropriate casseroles to use, the saffron, and the

successive phase of cooking. Another text is devoted to building

techniques where the use of prestressed concrete and hollow bricks

no longer isolates houses either from heat or from noise. There

follows a description both of his life in a modern building and of

his obsession with all the noises that assault his ears.26

The comments about good risotto and bad buildings provide a key to

Gadda’s understanding of architecture as a compounding of the arts of

living well, building well and thinking well. Gadda’s Macaronic work is

based on solid layers of erudition (often didactically demonstrated) drawn

from encyclopedic sources: grammars of familiar and exotic languages,

literary history, dictionaries of general botany, treatises on architecture,

gardening or silkworm breeding, and a volume that was surely also in

Invernizzi’s library: Colombo, the great Italian handbook of engineering.

It is formed by a combinative process that goes back to genealogical and

concomitant causes, connecting all the histories, in a heroic attempt at a

cognitive tangle. Gadda’s objective is an unfolding of the system of

the Novecento style of the exterior elevations and interiors. All these things

Invernizzi skilfully treads together.

In the flavourful analogical definition of the Macaronic art mentioned

earlier, Folengo binds together three components: refined flour, ordinary

cheese and fatty butter. This characterisation highlights the essentially

tectonic nature of the Macaronic art, as a mixture of three different

mindsets belonging to distinct and sometimes opposing realms.

Architecture and the Macaronic art share a comparable mix of tectonic

technology. Buildings are erected using a mix of low, crude technologies

(e.g., mortar bricks, snap-lines) and highly sophisticated technologies (steel

beams, lasers) paired with sharp hybrid metaphorical images. Before

I pursue this argument, however, a clarification is necessary. In the

Macaronic art, the initial mix is between two opposing groups of features:

the erudite and sophisticated together with the rough and ready.

In terms of language, this broadly means a learned Latin idiom together

with an unsophisticated Mantuan slang. Folengo then adds a third

ingredient, a leavening Italian – an artificial tongue composed of Latin,

Greek and other linguistic leftovers transcendentally blended into a tangy

Florentine vernacular soup.22 The usual opposition between high and low

is transformed with the introduction of a third index that advocates a

hybrid system of knowledge accommodating the polyphonic and multiple

presences of robust, vulgar and transcendent traditions. The extreme

artfulness of the application accentuates the inanity of the object,

while the mixing and remixing of techniques and objects generates a

broad range of processes of signification. Irony, fuelled by an odd mix of

rational thinking, low mockery and the ethereal sublime, is the original

Macaronic device for going beyond the worldly and the finite to reach the

spiritually infinite.

relations between things to produce an encyclopedia of infinite

possibilities: an encyclopedia that corresponds to a network with no

centre, to a labyrinth with no exit, or to an inferential model that is

infinitely open to new elements.

A text by Gadda demonstrates perfectly how Casa Girasole stands

out among its contemporaries in the heliotherapeutic landscapes of

Northern Italy.

… Everything had gone through the minds of the Pastrufazian*

architects, except perhaps for the elements of Good Taste. Passé the

styles of Umberto and Guglielmo and the Neo-classical and the Neo-

Neoclassical, and the Empire; hence we have the Liberty, the

Floreale, the Corinthian, the Pompeian, the Angioino and the

Egyptian-Sommaruga and the Coppede’-Alessio and the casinos of

Biarritz and Ostend made with caramelised plaster, the Paris–Lyons

Mediterranée’; and Fagnano-Olona, Monte Carlo, Indianapolis; the

Middle Ages, that is, an accommodating Filippo Maria arm-in-arm

with the Caliph; and even Queen Victoria (of England), albeit

recumbent on a Turkish ottoman. At that moment the functional

twentieth-century style was at work on the place, with its many

functional leg-breaking stairs, in pink marble; and you would not

believe the windows in the ‘ox-eye’ style, real nautical portholes,

for the laundry room and the kitchen; with the morning room

called the office (this word exercising an unimaginable charm on

the new Vignolas of Terepattola). Bathrooms so small you cannot fit

in them except by getting totally stuck, with their rational

dimensions, fifty-five centimetres by forty-five; or, when you get in

there, one cannot even begin to fathom how to get comfortable:

that is, how to freely express your will. Because certain expressions,

although free, are sometimes stringent and require a certain space

for manoeuvrability. Furthermore [these villas have] a gym for the

kids to use during the summer vacations, should they consider

themselves insufficiently supple and limber between one failure at

school and the next. They also have rooftop balconies for the Lady

and Master of the house, since they have long aspired to the

permanent tan (of the grey matter) that is so fashionable nowadays.

They have glass windows one metre and sixty centimetres wide,

inserted into the concrete structure, to bring inside the views of the

mountain and the lake, inside the hall that is, to which they give a

delightful temperature: the temperature of boiling eggs.

Enough already with the list of rational inventions.

Among the villas of the San Juan coast, on the road of the Prado

(the red reflections of their glass panels shooting through the silent

sunset), there was also Villa Maria Giuseppina, owned by the

Bertoloni family. In the twilight the gloomy, faraway facade

appeared streaked, now and again, by long horizontal stripes,

ashen grey and blood red. The villa had two towers, and two

lightning rods, at the two ends of a low and long central body; such

as to recall the image of two giraffes that were Siamese twins, or

that had been connected after backing up onto each other, sharing

their unified posterior parts. Of the two lightning rods, one seemed

to be hatching some malicious plan towards the northwestern side.

Ah! Something new but diabolically functional: the other seemed to

be doing exactly the same thing, but towards the southwest side –

and that was of running the lightning through the right-hand

neighbouring building, the other one through the left-hand one

instead: respectively Villa Enrichetta and Villa Antonietta. [Those

villas] seemingly squatting down there, in a modest attitude,

subdued to the two prostheses of Villa Giuseppina (the giraffes),

painted in light colours, had that mild and lymphatic appearance

which excites the cruel sadism of the elements, or at least seems to

do so.27

* Pastrufazian: adj. from pastrufaziana = pastrocci-facere, inept bungle

The English verb ponder, like the Italian and French pensare and penser,

combines an action – thinking – with the notion of something pending or

hanging in suspense. Macaronic thinking, being organic and ‘alive’, is

wholly based on pending thoughts. This makes it a supremely apt form for

architectural thinking related to construction or to writing, an ideal device

for weaving the written fabric of architectural theory within the marble

loom of its construction.

The pantagruelic nature of Macaronic thinking enables us to discover

the marvel of architectural cosmopoiesis28 – the making of actual and

possible worlds in which to envision human life in all its varied

dimensions. Careful use of the imagination allows us to unveil these

worlds, which are suspended on the threshold of the discipline of

architecture. Thus Macaronic thinking allows Casa Girasole to be

recognised, genealogically speaking, as one of the greatest villas of the

9 10

11 12

1 In 1576, when Vettor Pisani came to build his countryresidence, he chose the young Scamozzi rather thanPalladio, who 20 years earlier had designed the Villa Pisaniat Bagnolo for him. 2 See Marco Frascari, ‘A Secret Semiotic Skiagraphy: thecorporal theatre of meanings in Vincenzo Scamozzi’s Ideaof Architecture’ in VIA 11 (Journal of the Graduate Schoolof Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania), 1990, 32–51.3 Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, translatedby R. Tavenor & R. Schofield, Cambridge MA: MIT Press,1997, 6. I have changed the translation of particolari fromprivate to singular since those houses are the exclusiverepresentation of an individual.4 L’idea della architettvra universale, di Vincenzo Scamozzi, divisain x libri, Venice, 1615; reprinted Ridgewood, NJ: GreggPress, 1964, I: 27.5 I dieci libri dell’architettura di Vitruvio; tradotti e commentatida Daniele Barbaro, 1566; reprinted Milan: Il Polifilo, 1987,444.6 Ibid. 442.7 Palladio, The Four Books op. cit. 213. I have slightlymodified the translation to restore Palladio’s locution ‘bellamacchina del Mondo’ and to reinstate Palladio’s word soave. 8 Palladio, Scritti sull’architettura (1554–1579), edited by L.Puppi, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1988, 21.9 Palladio, The Four Books op. cit. 94.10 A non-reformed friar, Folengo was born in 1491 inCipada (Virgil’s Andes) near Mantua and died inCampanese near Bassano del Grappa in 1544. He adoptedthe pen name Merlin Cocai (Merlin was in honour of theArthurian Merlin and Cocai is the cork of a wine bottle).Later, he used Limerno (an anagram of Merlino) Pitocco(Destitute), to write in the classical language. TheMacaronic tradition includes, in Italy: Tifi Odasi, theinventor of the genre, Fossa da Cremona, Bassano daMantova, Giovan Giorgio Alione, Partenio Zanclaio,Bartolomeo Bolla, Cesare Orsini, and Bernardino Stefonio;in France: Remy Belleau, Étienne Tabourot and Antoniusde Arena; in England: William Drummond, George Ruggleand Alexander Geddes. Macaronic writing also extendedinto Holland, Germany, Portugal and Spain. See Lessicouniversale italiano, 1973, XII: 463.

Folengo’s Baldus (first printed in 1517) is an epicaccount of farfetched chivalric adventures. The genre’sacknowledged masterpiece, it enjoyed notable popularityin the sixteenth century with over a dozen editions andreprints. It was not without influence on Rabelais’Gargantua and Pantagruel. Such was the perceivedconnection that the first French translation of Folengo’sworks in 1606 bore the title Histoire maccaronique de MerlinCoccaie, prototype de Rabelais. See C. Cordié (ed.), Opere diTeofilo Folengo, Milan: Ricciardi, 1977, xii–xiii; M. Tetel,‘Rabelais and Folengo’, Comparative Literature, 15, Fall 1963,357–64; I. Paccagnella, ‘Plurilinguismo letterario: lingue,dialetti, linguaggi, in letteratura italiana’, in R. Antonelli

(ed.), Produzione e consumo, Turin: Einaudi, 1983, 103–67(141). Folengo himself always used the term ‘Macaronic art’rather than ‘Macaronic language’, emphasising that theMacaronic is a manner of making. See Mario Chiesa, ‘IlParnaso e la Zucca’, in G. Bernardi Perini & C. Marangoni(eds.), Teofilo Folengo nel quinto centenario della nascita(1491–1991), Florence: Leo Olshki, 1993, 57. 11Macaronic also has an association with the eighteenth-century London dandies who were called ‘macaronis’because they liked the Italian food they had experiencedduring the Grand Tour. The same connotation of a dandy isfound in the American folk song, ‘Yankee Doodle went totown/ Riding on a pony / Stuck a feather in his hat / Andcalled it macaroni’. Macaroon – originally a Frenchconfection made from a mix of sugar, egg whites andalmond paste – is derived from the Italian maccarone, ‘atrodden mixture’ (macare = to tread). In Italian the sameverb evolved into maccheroni and indicates a kind ofextruded pasta made with durum wheat. Probably theoriginal macaroni were very similar in shape but with aslightly different composition to what nowadays we callgnocchi. See Luigi Messedaglia, ‘Maccheroni and gnocchi’in E. & M. Billanovich (eds.), Vita e costume della Rinascenza inMerlin Cocai, two vols., Padua: Antenore, 1973 [first edition1939], 1: 427.12 Anton Francesco Doni, La zucca, Venice: FrancescoMarcolini, 1551–52. See also Mario Costabile, Un poeta ed unnarratore del cinquecento, Salerno: M. Spadafora, 1925. Theepisode itself is described in Laura Goggi Carotti, ‘Larielaborazione degli episodi della Domus Phantasie e dellaZucca (Baldus, XXV)’ in Cultura letteraria e tradizionepopolare in T. Folengo, 1979, 186–208, and M. Chiesa, ‘IlParnaso e la Zucca’ op. cit. 49–58.13 See L. Messedaglia op. cit.14 Teofilo Folengo, Baldus, edited by Emilio Faccioli, Turin:Einaudi, 1989, 466.15 The Journey of Charlemagne to Jerusalem and Constantinople(Le voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople),edited and translated by Jean-Louis G. Picherit,Birmingham, Ala: Summa Publications, 1984. In thismythical voyage, Charlemagne travels to Jerusalem togather relics, and to Constantinople to prove to his queenthat he is superior to Hugh the Strong.16 Translation by Franca Trubiano from Il viaggio diCarlomagno in Oriente, edited by M. Bonafin, Parma, 1987;verses 347–357 appear in Rodolfo Signorini, ‘Two MantuanFantasies’, Word & Image, 14:1–2, 1998, 188.17 Rodolfo Signorini, ‘L’Arca del Gonzaga e il cosmoalchemico di Manto’ in G. B. Perini & C. Marangoni op. cit.59–84.18 Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillius), Lives of theTwelve Caesars, Book VI, Nero, Cambridge MA: Loeb ClassicalLibrary, 1917, 137. 19 Il viaggio di Carlomagno in Oriente op. cit. verse 349.

Veneto: a villa where the arts of living well and building well, led by the

happy art of thinking well, acquire a purpose beyond their limited

purviews. In other words, Macaronic architecture – arising from the

interfacing of preprandium vita activa (cooking as making) with

postprandium vita contemplativa (digestion as casting the future) – produces a

vision where a single unitary principle that contains the entire

organisation of the cosmos in potentia becomes present in a simply gradual

and logically necessary gyratory presence.

13

20 Baldus op. cit. 205–11.21 Quoted by Lucia Bisi in ‘La casa girevole’, Lotus 40, 116,note 10.22 The original Macaronic is characterised linguistically byits vocabulary of Italian, dialect and Latin words within asubstantially Latin morphological, syntactic and prosodicform. In northern Italian Macaronic poetry thehybridisation is typically trilingual involving Latin, Italianand Po Valley dialects. Not the inherent product of apolyglot nature, the Italian Macaronic is a cunningly ironicand sophisticated device, a linguistic parody that exploitsthe situation experienced by the cultural elite. TheMacaronic in its purest form is a northern Italian creationwith precedents in medieval burlesque, goliardic verse andsacred parodies. Its origins lie in the late fifteenth-centuryBenedictine Athenaeum of Padua and specifically in thelinguistic experimentalism of Tifi Odasi, whose poemMacaronea defines the genre. However, its fame was assuredin the first half of the following century by Odasi’sMantuan pupil and emulator Teofilo Folengo. See alsosources quoted in note 9: C. Cordié, M. Tetel, I. Paccagnellaand R. Antonelli.23 Gadda’s writings are mostly collected in Dante Isella(ed.), Opere di Carlo Emilio Gadda, Milan: Garzanti, 1988.‘Gadda was a man of contradictions. An electro-technicalengineer (he had used his professional skills for about tenyears, mostly in South America), he sought to control hishypersensity and nervous temperament by means of ascientific, rational mentality, but only succeeded inmaking it worse; and he used his writing to give vent to hisirritability, phobias, and outbursts of misanthropy, whichhe tried to suppress in real life by donning the mask of agentleman from a bygone age full of courtesy and goodmanners.’ Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?, New York:Pantheon Books, 1999, 99.

Gadda judges the operations of the technology likecounterfeits of the nature resulting from study and Dedaliccourage, heroic escapes which engineer reach under the

stimulus of vital requirements and distressing necessities. The linkage of Gadda and the Macaronic began with

the work of the literary critic and philologist, GianfrancoContini, ‘Gadda o del “pastiche”’ in Solaria,January/February 1934; reprinted as ‘Primo approccio al“Castello di Udine”’ in Gianfranco Contini, Quarant’annid’amicizia. Scritti su Carlo Emilio Gadda (1934–1988), Turin:Einaudi, 1989, 3–10. The connection has also been carriedon by Albert Sbragia, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the ModernMacaronic, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996.24 William Weaver, The Craft of Translation, edited by JohnBiguenet and Rainer Schulte, Chicago: Chicago UniversityPress, 1989, 117–24.25 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium,Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 106–7.26 Ibid. 107.27 Carlo Emilio Gadda, La cognizione del dolore, Turin:Einaudi, 1963, 59–62. Gadda’s Macaronic makes his worksnotoriously difficult to translate. To translate this piece, Ihad to summon the help of the same powerful museconvoked by Giordano Bruno in his La cena delle ceneri, themost powerful text of solar literature: ‘By now, I reallyneed you here, sweet Mafelina, you who are the muse ofMerlin Cocai (Or qua te voglio dolce Mafelina che sei la musa diMerlin Cocai)’. English edition, G. Bruno, The Ash WednesdaySupper, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995, 113. Icompelled the euphonious muse as embodied in my wifePaola to give me the translation with the necessaryrhetorical flair; she has the Mafelina’s talent to unfoldGadda’s musing and analogical thoughts on Villa andVillini architecture and I hope she helped me well in thistask. For differences see also William Weaver’s translation,Carlo Emilio Gadda, Acquainted with Grief, New York: G.Braziller, 1969.28 For an ‘encyclopedic’ understanding of cosmopoiesissee Giuseppe Mazzotta, Cosmopoiesis, The RenaissanceExperiment, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.