I’m not looking for sympathy here, but writing well about houses is hard work. Unlike people, animals, airplanes, and other things that move about, show emotion–actually do things–houses tend to just sit there. We architecture writers are constantly at pains to bring life to an essentially static subject, and to do so in a way that adds something to the photographs that nearly always accompany our words. Making matters more difficult, we operate under an implicit vow of civility. We reserve our in-print utterances for the best buildings, keeping mum–in public, at least–on the worst, which would be so much fun to rip apart. So it was with great excitement that I read the passages below, from the recently released Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, in which one of my great literary heroes cuts loose on my favorite subject.
In January 1904, Twain and his ailing wife were in Tuscany, in whose mild climate, they hoped, she might regain her health. They rented a large villa outside Florence, and Twain writes at length about the building, its surroundings, and its illustrious residents, past and present. He reserves some especially choice words for his landlady, the Countess Massiglia, for whom he nurtures an extravagant loathing.
Villa di Quarto is a palace; Cosimo built it for that, its architect intended it for that, it has always been regarded as a palace, and an old resident of Florence told me the other day that it was a good average sample of the Italian palace of the great nobility, and that its grotesqueness and barbarities, incongruities and destitution of conveniences are to be found in the rest. I am able to believe this because I have seen some of the others.
…
The rest of the room is manifestly the result of the Countess Massiglia’s occupation. Its shouting inharmonies and disorders had their origin in her chaotic mind. The floor is covered with a felt-like filling of strenuous red, one can almost see Pharoah’s host floundering in it. There are four rugs scattered about like islands, violent rugs whose colors swear at each other and at the Red Sea. There is a sofa upholstered in a coarse material, a frenzy of green and blue and blood, a cheap and undeceptive imitation of Florentine embroidery … Upon the walls hang three good watercolors, six or eight very bad ones, a pious-looking portrait of the Countess in bridal veil and low neck, and a number of photographs of members of her tribe. One of them is a picture of the Count, who has a manly and intelligent face and looks like a gentleman. What possessed him to become proprietor of the Countess he probably could not explain at this late day himself.
…
The sun rises in such a way that all the morning it is pouring its light in through the thirty-three glass doors or windows which pierce the side of the house which looks upon the terrace and garden … the rest of the day the light floods this south end of the house, as I call it; at noon the sun is directly above Florence yonder in the distance in the plain–directly above those architectural features which have been so familiar to the world in pictures for some centuries: the Duomo, the Campanile, the Tomb of the Medici and the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; above Florence, but not very high above it, for it never climbs quite half way to the zenith in these winter days; in this position it begins to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle around into the west, for its light discovers, uncovers, and exposes a white snow-storm of villas and cities that you cannot train yourself to have confidence in, they appear and disappear so mysteriously and so as if they might be not villas and cities at all but the ghosts of perished ones of the remote and dim Etruscan times; and late in the afternoon the sun sinks down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular time and at no particular place, so far as I can see.
I like the image of Twain regarding the timeless Florentine vista, and as always, I admire his writing. I’ll have to watch myself now, though. Having drunk from this well, its going to be even harder to keep a civil tongue when I see buildings I don’t like.
