The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (2 page)

When we left it was dark.

It isn’t far from Cerveteri to Rome, barely twenty-five miles. But it was not a short journey. Half-way back the road became jammed with cars coming from Ladispoli and Fregene. We had to crawl along, almost at walking speed.

But once again, in that peace and torpoJ;" (even Giannina had gone to sleep), my memory kept going back over my early years in Ferrara, and to the Jewish cemetery at the end of via Montebello. Again I saw the large tree-strewn ground, the plaques and monuments set close together along the walls-the outer and inner, dividing walls-and, as ifl had it actually before my eyes, the monumental tomb of the Finzi-Continis; an ugly tomb, admittedly-since I was a child I had always heard it called so at home-and yet imposing, a sign of the family’s importance, if nothing else.

And my heart was wrenched as never before by the thought that in that tomb, which seemed to have been set up to guarantee the everlasting repose of its first customer-his, and that ofhis descendants-only one of the Finzi-Continis I had known and loved in fact achieved that everlasting repose. The only one actually buried there was Alberto, the elder child, who died in 1942 of lymphogranuloma. But where Micol, the second child, and professor Ermanno, the father, and signora Olga, the mother, and signora Regina, signora Olga’s very old paralysed mother, all deported to Germany in the autumn of’ 43, found their burial place is anyone’s guess.

The tomb was large, solid, really imposing: a kind of vaguely ancient and vaguely oriental temple, the kind you saw in the productions of
Aida
and
Nabucco
fashionable in our opera houses until a few years ago. In any other cemetery, for instance the municipal graveyard next door, a pretentious tomb of the kind would not have been the least bit surprising, and in fact, lost among so many others, might even have gone unnoticed. But in ours it was the only one: and so, although it arose quite some distance from the entrance gates, in fact at the far end of an abandoned stretch of ground where no one had been buried for over half a century, it seemed a thing apart, and hit you in the eye straight away.

A distinguished professor of architecture, responsible for many other contemporaneous outrages in Ferrara, had been entrusted with the building of it by Moise Finzi-Contini, Alberto and Micol’s great-grandfather, who died in 1863, shortly after the northern provinces of the papal states had been annexed by the kingdom of Italy; as a result of which the Jewish ghetto in Ferrara was abolished, once and for all. A big landowner, “reformer of Ferrarese agriculture”-according to the plaque the Jewish community had set up on the synagogue wall in via Mazzini, on the third landing, commemorating his virtues “as an Italian and as aJew”-but obviously without a very highly developed artistic taste, once he had decided to set up a tomb
sibi et suis
he must have let the architect do what he pleased. Things seemed fine and flourishing in those days: everything about the times encouraged hope and daring. Swept up into a mood of euphoria by his newly acquired civil equality, the same that as a young man, at the time of the Cisalpine Republic, had allowed him to reclaim his first substantial piece of land, the unbending patriarch understandably, in those solemn circumstances, spared no expense; very likely, in fact, he gave the distinguished professor of architecture
carte blanche.
And with so much marble at his disposal, and such marble, too ! -white from Carrara, red from Verona, grey flecked with black, yellow, blue, pale green - the architect had, in his turn, lost his head.

An incredible mess came out of it, echoes of the mausoleum of Theodoric at Ravenna, the Egyptian temples at Luxor, Roman baroque, and even, as the stocky pillars of the peristyle showed, archaic Greek of Cnossus, all jostling one another. But there it was. And graduaUy, year after year, time that in its way always settles everything, somehow managed to harmonize this unlikely mixture of styles. Moise Finzi-Contini, here called “austere example of unceasing toil”, died in 
’63.
His wife Allegrina Camaioli, “the angel of the house”, in
’75.
In
1877
their only son, Menotti the engineer, died still young, and he was followed twenty years later by his wife Josette, who belonged to the Treviso branch of the family of baron Artom. After which the upkeep of the chapel, which had taken in only one more member of the family, Guido, a child of six, in
1914,
had obviously fallen into the hands of people who were less and less inclined to keep it clean and tidy and repair any damage there might be, and above all keep a check on the endless incursions of the surrounding greenery. Tufts of dark, almost black, practically metallic grass, ferns, stinging nettles, thistles, and poppies had been allowed to grow and press forward more and more freely. So that in 1924 and ’25, about sixty years after its inauguration, when I saw it for the first time as a child, the Finzi-Continis’ tomb (“A real horror,” my mother never failed to say, as I held her hand) already looked more or less as it does now that no one has been directly concerned with looking after it for such a long time. Halfburied in the rank growth around it, the surfaces of its polychrome marbles, once smooth and shining, now opaque under their dark patina ofdust, its roofand outer steps visibly decayed by wind and weather: even then it already seemed changed into something rich and strange, the way any long-sunk object always does.

How anyone is drawn to solitude, and why, nobody knows. But the fact remains that the same isolation, the same separation with which the Finzi-Continis had surrounded their dead surrounded their
other
house as well, the house at the end of corso Ercole I d’Este. Immortalized by Giosue Carducci and by Gabriele d’Annunzio, this Ferrarese street is so well known to lovers of art and poetry all over the world that any description of it is superfluous. As everyone knows, it is in the heart of the northern part of the city that was added to the small medieval town during the Renaissance by duke Ercole, and named after him. Wide and straight as a die from the Castle to the Wall of the Angels, with dark, imposing dwelling-houses on either side of its entire length, and, high in the distance, a backdrop ofbrick red, leafy green, and sky that seems to lead you into infinity: Corso Ercole I d’Este is so fine, and such a tourist attraction, that the left-wing town council that has been running Ferrara for nearly fifteen years has realized it must be left as it is and strictly protected against speculative builders and shopkeepers ; in fact, that its aristocratic character must be preserved exactly as it was.

The street is famous: and besides, substantially unchanged.

Even today, the house of the Finzi-Continis must be approached from Corso Ercole I-except that today, to reach it, you must cross more than half an extra kilometre across a huge stretch of mostly untilled ground; although it still includes the historic ruins of a sixteenth-century building, at one time a residence or “pleasure ground” of the Este family, bought by the same Moise in 1850, and later, through successive alterations and restorations, transformed by his heirs into a kind of neo-Gothic manor-house, English style: in spite ofso much that is ofinterest in it still, who now knows anything about it, I wonder, and who still remembers it? The Touring Club guide has no mention of it, and this justifies tourists passing through the town. But in Ferrara itself, even the few Jews left who make up the languishing Jewish community seem to have no memory of it.

The Touring Club guide does not mention the house, and this is no doubt quite wrong of it. But let’s be fair: the garden, or, to be more precise, the great park that surrounded the Finzi-Continis’ house before the war, and stretched for many acres right up to the Wall of the Angels on the one hand, and to Porta San Benedetto on the other, was in itself something quite rare and remarkable (in the early years of the century the Touring Club guide never failed to mention it, in a curious tone, halflyrical and halfworldly), but today it no longer exists, quite literally. All the large trees, limes, elms, beeches, poplars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, pines, firs, larches, cedars of Lebanon, cypresses, oaks, holm oaks, and even palms and eucalyptus trees, planted in hundreds by Josette Artom, were cut down for firewood during the last two years of the war, and the land is slowly going back to what it once was, when Moise Finzi-Contini bought it from the family of marchese Avogli: just another of the many large gardens within the city walls.

The house itself should be considered. But this big, odd building, pretty badly damaged in an air raid in 1944, is still occupied today by fifty evacuee families belonging to the same beggarly sub-proletariat, not unlike the Roman slum-dwellers, that still keeps thronging the passages of the office in via Mortara: rough, embittered, intolerant folk (showers of stones, I heard, greeted the municipal sanitary inspector when he rode out on his bicycle to have an official look round, a few months ago), who, to discourage any notions about eviction that might occur to the Superintendent of Monuments in Emilia and Romagna, have hit on the bright idea of scraping the last remnants of the old painting off the walls.

Well, why endanger the poor tourists?-I imagine those who compiled the latest editions of the Touring Club guide wondered. And in fact, to see what?

You might call the Finzi-Continis’ tomb “a horror” and smile at it, but you could not, even after fifty years, manage to smile at their house, isolated over there among the mosquitoes and frogs of the Panfilio canal and the drains, and enviously nicknamed the
magna domus.
Oh, you could pretty nearly feel sore about it still! Suppose you just-say-walked along the endless wall that ran round the garden on the Corso Ercole I d’Este side, a wall interrupted about half-way round by a portentous dark oak gate, without any handles at all; or else, on the other side, peer through the woody tangle of trunks and branches and the leaves below them from the top of the WaU of the Angels where it beetles over the park, till you caught a glimpse of the strange spiky outline of the house, and behind it, very much farther away, at the edge of a clearing, the dun-coloured stain of the tennis court: then the old discourtesy of their disdain and separation would come back hurtfully all over again, almost as searing as it used to be.

What an absurd, upstart idea !-my own father used to say, with a kind of passionate rancour, every time the subject came up.

Yes, of course-he admitted-the old owners, the family of marchese Avogli, had the bluest possible blood in their veins; garden and ruins rejoiced
ab antiquo
in the highly decorative name of Barchetto del Duca: all very fine, admittedly !-and all the more so since Moise Finzi-Contini, who deserved full credit for realizing he was on to a good thing, had obviously got it for the proverbial song. So what?- he continued, straight away. Did Moise’s son Menotti, rather pointedly nicknamed “the crazy apricot”, after the colour of an eccentric fur-lined overcoat he wore, really have to transfer himselfand his wifeJosette to a part of town that was so much out of the way, so unhealthy even now, so imagine what it must have been like then!-and so deserted, besides, so melancholy, and above all, so very unsuitable.

Well, it was all very well for the parents, who belonged to a different age, and in any case could perfectly well afford the luxury of investing whatever they liked in old stones. And it was especially all very well for Josette Artom, who came from the Treviso branch of the family ofbaron Artom (a magnificent creature, in her time: a busty, blue-eyed blonde whose mother came from Berlin, an Olschky). Apart from being so crazy about the house of Savoy that in May 1898, shortly before she died, she took it on herself to send an admiring telegram to General Bava Beccaris, who had fired on the Milanese socialists and anarchists, poor devils, and a fanatical admirer of Germany in the days of Bismarck’s spiked helmet, she had never bothered, since her husband Menotti, eternally at her feet, had installed her in her Valhalla, to disguise her own dislike of the Jewish world of Ferrara, which was too narrow for her-so she said: or, however grotesque such a thing might appear, her own
fundamental anti-semitism.
But professor Ermanno and Signora Olga (he a scholar, she a Herrera from Venice: which means she was born into a very good Sephardic family, of course, but one that was financiaUy not too sound, although fearfully orthodox) : what sort of people did they think they’d become? Real, top-level aristocrats? Of course, of course, they had lost their son Guido, their first child, who died in 1914, aged only six, after a lightning attack of American-type infantile paralysis, against which even Dr. Corcos could do nothing; and what a terrible blow this must have been to them: to her, signora Olga, especially, who never went out of mourning from that time on. But apart from this, wasn’t it really that, what with one thing and another, living exclusively on their own had made them swollen-headed too, and had given them the same absurd whims as Menotti Finzi-Contini and his good lady had had? Aristocracy, my eye! Instead of giving themselves such airs, they’d have done very much better not to forget who they were, and where they came from, since there’s no doubt that Jews-Sephardic and Ashkenazi, western and eastern, Tunisians, Berbers, Yemenites, and even Ethiopians-whatever part of the world, under whatever sky history might have strewn them, were and would always be Jews, which means closely related. Old Moise certainly gave himself no airs! No delusions of grandeur for him ! When he was living in the ghetto, at 24 via Vignatagliata, in the house where he had wanted to end his days, come what might, resisting the pressure ofhis haughty Trevisan daughter-in-law, who was impatient to move to Barchetto del Duca as soon as possible, he went out shopping himself every morning in piazza delleErbe, with his shopping-basket tucked cosily under his arm. And it was he, for this very reason nicknamed a!
gatt,
* *[ “The cat”: Ferrarese dialect.]who had pulled the family up from nothing. Because if it was quite true that “that” Josette came down to Ferrara with a big dowry, consisting of a villa in the province of Treviso with frescoes by Tiepolo, a fat cheque, too, and of course jewels, plenty of them, which on first nights in the theatre, against the red velvet background of her private box, drew the eyes of the entire theatre on her and her glittering bosom, it was equally true that
al gatt,
and he alone, had got together the thousands of acres in the
bassa,*[
* The part of the Po delta which is in the province of Ferrara.] between Codigoro, Massa Fiscaglia and Jolanda di Savoia, on which even today most of the family’s wealth was based. The monumental tomb in the cemetery: that was the only mistake (of taste, above all) of which you could accuse Moise Finzi-Contini. But besides that, nothing.