The Macaronic Dream of Casa Girasole 02

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

Above: Vincenzo Scamozzi, houses (case particolari); for it is plausible that they supplied the
Villa Bardellini, Monfumo,
1594, from L’Idea models for public buildings, since it is very likely that
dell’Architettura Universale.
Left: Thomas Diges, A Perfit man previously lived by himself, and then, seeing that he needed
Description of the Caelestial Orbes,
1576. Dating from the same the help of other men in providing those things which would
year that Rocca Pisana was
built, the chart epitomises a make him happy (if happiness can be found down here), he quite
new conception of nature,
with the sun at the centre of naturally longed for and loved the company of other men: so they
the orbiting planets, and the
previously fixed sphere of stars formed settlements from a number of houses and from settlements
broken to create an infinite
cosmos. cities in which were public places and buildings.3
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
Zucca caption please 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.
5 6
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
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
7 8
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. The usual opposition between high and low
22
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.
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
9 10
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
11
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.
1 In 1576, when Vettor Pisani came to build his country
residence, he chose the young Scamozzi rather than
Palladio, who 20 years earlier had designed the Villa Pisani
at Bagnolo for him.
2 See Marco Frascari, ‘A Secret Semiotic Skiagraphy: the
corporal theatre of meanings in Vincenzo Scamozzi’s Idea
of Architecture’ in VIA 11 (Journal of the Graduate School
of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania), 1990, 32–51.
3 Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, translated
by R. Tavenor & R. Schofield, Cambridge MA: MIT Press,
1997, 6. I have changed the translation of particolari from
private to singular since those houses are the exclusive
representation of an individual.
4 L’idea della architettvra universale, di Vincenzo Scamozzi, divisa
in x libri, Venice, 1615; reprinted Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg
Press, 1964, I: 27.
5 I dieci libri dell’architettura di Vitruvio; tradotti e commentati
da Daniele Barbaro, 1566; reprinted Milan: Il Polifilo, 1987,
444.
6 Ibid. 442.
7 Palladio, The Four Books op. cit. 213. I have slightly
modified the translation to restore Palladio’s locution ‘bella
macchina 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 in
Cipada (Virgil’s Andes) near Mantua and died in
Campanese near Bassano del Grappa in 1544. He adopted
the pen name Merlin Cocai (Merlin was in honour of the
Arthurian 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. The
Macaronic tradition includes, in Italy: Tifi Odasi, the
inventor of the genre, Fossa da Cremona, Bassano da
Mantova, Giovan Giorgio Alione, Partenio Zanclaio,
Bartolomeo Bolla, Cesare Orsini, and Bernardino Stefonio;
in France: Remy Belleau, Étienne Tabourot and Antonius
de Arena; in England: William Drummond, George Ruggle
and Alexander Geddes. Macaronic writing also extended
into Holland, Germany, Portugal and Spain. See Lessico
universale italiano, 1973, XII: 463.
Folengo’s Baldus (first printed in 1517) is an epic
account of farfetched chivalric adventures. The genre’s
acknowledged masterpiece, it enjoyed notable popularity
in the sixteenth century with over a dozen editions and
reprints. It was not without influence on Rabelais’
Gargantua and Pantagruel. Such was the perceived
connection that the first French translation of Folengo’s
works in 1606 bore the title Histoire maccaronique de Merlin
Coccaie, prototype de Rabelais. See C. Cordié (ed.), Opere di
Teofilo 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
12
(ed.), Produzione e consumo, Turin: Einaudi, 1983, 103–67
(141).
Folengo himself always used the term ‘Macaronic art’
rather than ‘Macaronic language’, emphasising that the
Macaronic is a manner of making. See Mario Chiesa, ‘Il
Parnaso e la Zucca’, in G. Bernardi Perini & C. Marangoni
(eds.), Teofilo Folengo nel quinto centenario della nascita
(1491–1991), Florence: Leo Olshki, 1993, 57.
11 Macaronic also has an association with the eighteenth-
century London dandies who were called ‘macaronis’
because they liked the Italian food they had experienced
during the Grand Tour. The same connotation of a dandy is
found in the American folk song, ‘Yankee Doodle went to
town/ Riding on a pony / Stuck a feather in his hat / And
called it macaroni’. Macaroon – originally a French
confection made from a mix of sugar, egg whites and
almond paste – is derived from the Italian maccarone, ‘a
trodden mixture’ (macare = to tread). In Italian the same
verb evolved into maccheroni and indicates a kind of
extruded pasta made with durum wheat. Probably the
original macaroni were very similar in shape but with a
slightly different composition to what nowadays we call
gnocchi. See Luigi Messedaglia, ‘Maccheroni and gnocchi’
in E. & M. Billanovich (eds.), Vita e costume della Rinascenza in
Merlin Cocai, two vols., Padua: Antenore, 1973 [first edition
1939], 1: 427.
12 Anton Francesco Doni, La zucca, Venice: Francesco
Marcolini, 1551–52. See also Mario Costabile, Un poeta ed un
narratore del cinquecento, Salerno: M. Spadafora, 1925. The
episode itself is described in Laura Goggi Carotti, ‘La
rielaborazione degli episodi della Domus Phantasie e della
Zucca (Baldus, XXV)’ in Cultura letteraria e tradizione
popolare in T. Folengo, 1979, 186–208, and M. Chiesa, ‘Il
Parnaso 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 this
mythical voyage, Charlemagne travels to Jerusalem to
gather relics, and to Constantinople to prove to his queen
that he is superior to Hugh the Strong.
16 Translation by Franca Trubiano from Il viaggio di
Carlomagno in Oriente, edited by M. Bonafin, Parma, 1987;
verses 347–357 appear in Rodolfo Signorini, ‘Two Mantuan
Fantasies’, Word & Image, 14:1–2, 1998, 188.
17 Rodolfo Signorini, ‘L’Arca del Gonzaga e il cosmo
alchemico di Manto’ in G. B. Perini & C. Marangoni op. cit.
59–84.
18 Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillius), Lives of the
Twelve Caesars, Book VI, Nero, Cambridge MA: Loeb Classical
Library, 1917, 137.
19 Il viaggio di Carlomagno in Oriente op. cit. verse 349.
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 by
its vocabulary of Italian, dialect and Latin words within a
substantially Latin morphological, syntactic and prosodic
form. In northern Italian Macaronic poetry the
hybridisation is typically trilingual involving Latin, Italian
and Po Valley dialects. Not the inherent product of a
polyglot nature, the Italian Macaronic is a cunningly ironic
and sophisticated device, a linguistic parody that exploits
the situation experienced by the cultural elite. The
Macaronic in its purest form is a northern Italian creation
with precedents in medieval burlesque, goliardic verse and
sacred parodies. Its origins lie in the late fifteenth-century
Benedictine Athenaeum of Padua and specifically in the
linguistic experimentalism of Tifi Odasi, whose poem
Macaronea defines the genre. However, its fame was assured
in the first half of the following century by Odasi’s
Mantuan pupil and emulator Teofilo Folengo. See also
sources quoted in note 9: C. Cordié, M. Tetel, I. Paccagnella
and 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-technical
engineer (he had used his professional skills for about ten
years, mostly in South America), he sought to control his
hypersensity and nervous temperament by means of a
scientific, rational mentality, but only succeeded in
making it worse; and he used his writing to give vent to his
irritability, phobias, and outbursts of misanthropy, which
he tried to suppress in real life by donning the mask of a
gentleman from a bygone age full of courtesy and good
manners.’ Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1999, 99.
Gadda judges the operations of the technology like
counterfeits of the nature resulting from study and Dedalic
courage, 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, Gianfranco
Contini, ‘Gadda o del “pastiche”’ in Solaria,
January/February 1934; reprinted as ‘Primo approccio al
“Castello di Udine”’ in Gianfranco Contini, Quarant’anni
d’amicizia. Scritti su Carlo Emilio Gadda (1934–1988), Turin:
Einaudi, 1989, 3–10. The connection has also been carried
on by Albert Sbragia, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern
Macaronic, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996.
24 William Weaver, The Craft of Translation, edited by John
Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 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 works
notoriously difficult to translate. To translate this piece, I
had to summon the help of the same powerful muse
convoked by Giordano Bruno in his La cena delle ceneri, the
most powerful text of solar literature: ‘By now, I really
need you here, sweet Mafelina, you who are the muse of
Merlin Cocai (Or qua te voglio dolce Mafelina che sei la musa di
Merlin Cocai)’. English edition, G. Bruno, The Ash Wednesday
Supper, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995, 113. I
compelled the euphonious muse as embodied in my wife
Paola to give me the translation with the necessary
rhetorical flair; she has the Mafelina’s talent to unfold
Gadda’s musing and analogical thoughts on Villa and
Villini architecture and I hope she helped me well in this
task. 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 cosmopoiesis
see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Cosmopoiesis, The Renaissance
Experiment, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.