Local hero

A few days ago our friends took us to some neighborhood historical shrines: the little inn-cum-farmhouse where Giuseppe Verdi was born; the church across the way, where he took music lessons as a boy and played the organ; and the rather grand villa he built for himself and his second wife once he became rich and famous, in his mid-thirties.

The farmhouse was very modest (albeit larger in square footage than my house in El Cerrito), the kind of place where the pigs and cows and humans lived in very close proximity. It was dwarfed by the church, an imposing but not particularly elegant structure. The stairs to the organ that little Beppo once climbed are proudly displayed.

Here's the organ itself. I'm not sure if it is still played, but I assume it is. The piano in the Verdi museum in the nearby town of Busseto has supposedly not been touched since the Maestro died. (Danny was itching to sneak over and play "Chopsticks" but our guide never left him alone with the instrument.)

The church is dedicated to St. Michael. This statue of him has no historical value, but it tickled me.

Especially the poor devil at the business end of the spear. I imagine there are political/ethnic overtones of some kind to the way this vision of evil is depicted.

How could anyone not feel at least a little Christian pity for this tortured soul?

Villa Verdi, where the composer lived for most of his life, is an elegant palazzo in a large park planted in the then very modern English-romantic style. They don't permit photos inside, but it had the high-ceilinged, overstuffed, dark-furniture-warehouse look of its era. 

Everything was as Verdi left it, because in his will he specified that his heir, his adopted daughter, had to keep the place "as is" in perpetuity. The villa is still inhabited by her descendants--only a small portion of the house is open for guided visits, as a private museum--and we wondered if they have also been living with the same mattresses, drapes, books, paintings, etc., for five or six generations ago. Verdi was reportedly very generous--his will also gave land to his tenant farmers and benefited many local charities--but his insistence on controlling his family's interior decor choices from beyond the grave made me dislike him. I hope they've snuck some Ikea into the rest of the house.

The grounds are lovely, and indeed very romantic. He planted dozens of exotic trees and laid paths all over the place. They are sand so that he wouldn't be irritated by the sound of shoes and skirts on gravel.

He also put in a grotto and a sinuous pond (he called it his ponzzanghera, or puddle) in the shape of a treble clef.  

Also on view are Verdi's six carriages (from a little two-person gig to a gigantic landau in which he made the six-week journey to St. Petersburg) and what used to be the estate's winery. The bottles in the picture below (hand blown) were the ones from which Verdi drank his last hundred or so liters of wine. It seems a little hoard-y to hang on to all this stuff, doesn't it? But he is a national hero, and who doesn't love his operas?

The best thing about the tour, however, was that the guide spoke, in Italian but slowly and simply...and I understood at least 50 percent of what she said! For a moment I felt like a bit of a genius myself.