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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 thatI planned to go on to study architecture, and having heard from a friendabout an amazing summer retreat, a rotary villa, took me there oneSunday afternoon. Before lunch we had gone to nearby Lonigo to see Vincenzo Scamozzi’s youthful masterpiece, the splendid and solitary RoccaPisana.
1
Rocca Pisana was not conceived as a home to live in, but was morea retreat for relaxation and contemplation during the long hot days of summer. With its central domed space, it was also, on a higher level, abuilt expression of Renaissance cosmology. When I saw Casa Girasole, Irealised it too was a cosmological machine, while Rocca Pisana was in turna rotating villa. I felt, intuitively, that there was no big difference betweenthe 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 wasconfirmed when I came across a sectional drawing of Villa Bardellini, theplan of which is very similar to Rocca Pisana. The drawing shows thetracings of sunlight and shadows circling all around the villa and enteringdirectly 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 thebarrier separating material and immaterial existence, to create anintimate relation between men and gods. Of paramount importance to thecosmological representation is the sense of a motor force linking humanaction to a divine destiny. As Palladio persuasively states in the Forewordto the
 First Book
of his treatise, this motor force can be supplied by singularbuildings, emphatic and distinctive products of individual expression,aggregating to make a possible cosmos:I thought it would be most appropriate to begin with singularhouses (
case particolari
); for it is plausible that they supplied themodels for public buildings, since it is very likely thatman previously lived by himself, and then, seeing that he neededthe help of other men in providing those things which wouldmake him happy (if happiness can be found down here), he quitenaturally longed for and loved the company of other men: so they formed settlements from a number of houses and from settlementscities in which were public places and buildings.
3
 Above: Vincenzo Scamozzi, Villa Bardellini, Monfumo,1594, from
 L’Ideadell’Architettura Universale
.Left: Thomas Diges,
 A Perfit Description of the Caelestial Orbes
,1576. Dating from the same year that Rocca Pisana wasbuilt, the chart epitomises anew conception of nature, with the sun at the centre of the orbiting planets, and thepreviously fixed sphere of starsbroken to create an infinitecosmos.
 
03In 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 themachine is described by Daniele Barbaro in his 1556 translation andcritical edition of Vitruvius’s
On Architecture
– a text that Scamozzi admitsto having read several times.
4
First, every machine is born from the nature of things, and iscontrolled by the masterly courses of the heavens. Considering thecontinuous (
continuata
) nature of the Sun, Moon and the other fivestars, if the machine did not rotate then we would not have lighton earth and the ripeness of fruits … and in the many convenientthings 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 …thatmakes 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 continuousrevolutions according to the demands of nature and how they maintain themselves by the suave harmony of their measuredmovements, we cannot doubt that … these small temples which we build must be similar to this vast one which He, with boundlessgenerosity, perfected with but a word of command.
7
Furthermore, in his guide to the antiquities of Rome, Palladio again usesthe expression ‘
macchina del Mondo
’ in describing Nero’s Domus Aurea:The main hall was round and was turning constantly, akin to themachine of the world.
8
Palladio’s own best-known
macchina
is the Villa Rotonda, a summerhideaway on the outskirts of Vicenza. In his treatise, Palladio points outthat it sits amid hills ‘which resemble a vast theatre’.
9
The villa can be seen04as the axle of the machine of the world, rotating virtually through itsquadripartite 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 theMacaronic art, so called from macaroni, an ancient savoury foodstuff ‘bound together with flour, cheese and butter, which is fat, coarse andrustic (
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 haveno beginning and no end. By means of intuition, individuals can harnessthese infinite worlds. Through their changing corporeal presence, they candefine their core, creating an intelligible sphere. Adopting a typicalRenaissance image, this sphere can be seen as a
 zucca
(pumpkin) – as ahead, an empty container, or both: an inhabitable intellectual sphere.
12
Towards the end of Folegno’s mock epic masterpiece
 Baldus
, theeponymous hero and his companions, a group of young outlaws fleeingfrom 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 andcultivate vanities: philosophers, poets, singers, astrologers. In thepumpkin, they are punished: for every lie they have told while they werealive, demons pull out a tooth; and as each tooth is pulled, a new oneerupts in its place. At this point, Folengo interrupts the narration andinserts himself into the tale to affirm: ‘the pumpkin is my fatherland(
 zucca mihi patria est
)’. Baldus and his friends can go on to defeat thedemons, but Folengo will halt in
machina grandis
of his Parnassus, thecosmological 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, ittakes humour to the point of absurdity through its stylistic and diachronictwists. Macaronic thinkers are not revolutionaries, but are purveyors of apermanent contestation, one that goes beyond any specific political,religious or moral polemic to lay siege to the foundations of ourcomprehension and representation of the world. The Macaronic pulverisesand dissolves into nothingness any abuse of reason resulting fromfraudulent words, but at the same time constructs possibilities for dreams.
Zucca caption please
 
65The palace of King Hugh is a pneumatic apparatus, with a nielloed silverpilaster at its centre,
19
 whereas Folengo’s cloister is a motorised device,generating bizarre noises that draw Baldus towards the centre of therotating apparatus.One hears nothing other than the murmur produced by thebuilding. Baldus’s objective is to locate the source of thehammering, therefore, seeing a stair, a nautilus spiral, he beginsto climb it, but he continues to rotate as before, and his circularmotion is doubled because the whole machine rotates and carriesthe 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 movementup the stair is an ascent from the terrestrial dimension of the sublunar world to the heptenary sequence of Ptolemaic cosmology. At the top of therotating cloister he enters a vision of the Ptolemaic machine of the sevenspheres, 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 opposingdiscourses. Rather, his works invite us to extract the abstract andphilosophical message hidden in the allegory, a process that is itself quiterational. Alchemy is thinking with materials, whereas chemistry isthinking about materials. Alchemy, in its most traditional interpretation,is nothing other than the human ability to transform ‘inanimate’ matterinto potent substances.Invernizzi’s motto – were he to have had one – could have been ‘WithReinforced Concrete A Mechanical Precision Can Be Achieved’.
21
He was analchemist of that material and its structural possibilities. In Casa Girasole,by perfectly balancing elasticity and tension, he transforms the traditionalstatic leadenness of reinforced concrete into a golden materiality of dynamic loads.There is a further point that reinforces the case for the Macaronicnature of this building. Invernizzi brought together a trinity of collaborators – architect Ettore Fagiuoli, interior decorator FaustoSaccarotti, and mechanical engineer Romolo Carapacchi – to make his villa a compound of 
 gravitas, levitas
and
 vanitas
.
Gravitas
is expressed in thebase of the building, in the entry and the ostentatious arcade designed by Fagiuoli;
levitas
in the structural vierendeels and machinery; and
 vanitas
inMacaronic thinking is a monstrous technique: a constructive dreamthat when applied to the built world reveals that the architecture is stilland always will be sustainable, flexible and fertile. So, when I visited CasaGirasole, I did not make the facile connection between it and the health-orientated architecture of the period, as epitomised by the buildings of theFascist
Colonie
, configured to draw maximum benefit from the sun. Instead, with the reading of 
 Baldus
fresh in my mind, it occurred to me that thedesigner of this rotating construction, the Veronese engineer AngeloInvernizzi, was under a Macaronic influence. The most likely source of thisinfluence: the remarkable writings of the contemporaneous Veronesehistorian 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 atower topped by an elegant lantern. When I saw it, I immediately thoughtof 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 uponan extraordinary astronomical and alchemical structure, a squaresurrounded by an arcade of bronze binary columns supporting silverarches. This metallic cloister rotates upon itself, like the celestial spheresrotate. Or better, as Folengo states (bringing the analogy into theMacaronic realm of the infraordinary), it turns around like the threadingspools used by the spinners in Modena and Bologna. Folengo defines thisbizarre 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 Northernor any other wind blowsStriking the palace from the western sideIt 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 cosmologicalroom in Nero’s Domus Aurea mentioned earlier.
17
In
The Lives of the Caesars
,Suetonius describes this room as ‘constantly rotating day and night, likethe heavens (
 perpetuo diebus ac noctibus vice mundi circumageretur 
)’.
18
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