SILVANA'S FOUNTAIN
Vicki Woods follows
a carving from Carrara to Rodeo Drive
MY NEIGHBOUR the urologist has a vineyard at Camaiore near Lucca, from which it's only a half-hour drive to the marble quarries at Carrara. Sculptors have been lodging at Camaiore since the inven- tion of cars, and my neighbour the urolog- ist sometimes has one or other or both of a pair of twin sculptresses called Maesano to stay with him. Their studio is in Genoa, but they like the bello paesaggio round his vineyard; they like to hear how his children are getting on with their Italian ('Va bene, molto Toscano') and they like the fact that my neighbour the urologist is a keen cook. They're keen cooks themselves and will spend hours tearing basil leaves into small pieces instead of cutting them with scissors or knives because that makes them bitter, all the time raving about the last wonderful meal they had: bollito or ribollito or salsa di lepre. 'Moho, molto bene,' they say, rolling their eyes and pushing their index fingers into their dimples and making kissing noises.
They are both big women, with muscular arms that look well capable of knocking chips off lumps of hard white marble with a crack-hammer. They do work with marble and travertino and pietrasanta when they can afford it, but it's cheaper for them to work in bronze. They do small fist-sized things. You can always tell each twin's bronzes apart: Silvana the elder's are smooth and rounded; Stefania the youn- ger's are angular, squared-off, pointed. They are famous for the patina on their bronzes: Silvana tried to explain how they took many months to achieve the patina, but their Italian became hilarious, and I understood very little apart from the fact that a 400-year-old outside lavatory had some bearing on things. When I met them two years ago, I told Silvana I'd recently been to California. She said she was going to California soon to make a fountain. An Americano was build- ing a campanile in a shopping centre; he was very, very rich; money was no object; he'd already bought up everything that she and Stefania had ever made except for two little bronzes named after two sons of my neighbour the urologist and a marble snail that he'd bought off Silvana years ago for more money than he could afford, and which they'd gratefully (and frugally) lived off for nearly a year. The Americano wanted the fountain carved from traverti- no; it would be very, very expensive but he'd chosen the design from the half-dozen she'd offered him and told her to find the stone. 'Whereabouts in California?' I asked, and she wrinkled up her brow. llomento'. She couldn't remember the name. Somewhere very, very rich. A street full of very expensive shops, altissima moda, Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani, Valentino, Chanel. 'You mean like Rodeo Drive or somewhere?' I said. Ecco! E vero! Rodeo Drive! Opposite a big, big hotel called . . ."The Beverly Wilshire?' I asked. `Blimey, Silvana. If he's bought a piece of Rodeo Drive big enough to build a campanile and a fountain on, he must be a multi-millionaire, your Americano.' Yes,' she said, 'multi-multi-millionaire'.
So when I went back to Los Angeles this summer I took a cab along to Rodeo Drive to see how she was getting on. Both sides of the street are thick with galleries selling not very interesting sculptures and paint- ings: I couldn't find anything like the work Silvana and Stefania do. I looked up hill and down dale for a little campanile or a fountain, but failed to find one. Rodeo Drive is one of the few streets in Los Angeles along which people can walk. So some people do actually walk up and down it, diving in and out of ritzy shops and coming out with glossy carrier-bags, as in Pretty Woman. Rodeo Drive actually has shop after shop along its length, instead of shop after car lot after Japanese bank after Holistic Health Center. Even so, distances are stretched by European standards, and I find it hard to keep walking when the space between parking meters is about 50 feet, so as to fit in those mad cars.
There was a terrific amount of dust and noise down one side of the road, where some gigantic urban redevelopment was taking place, with vast cranes, armies of workmen, deep holes. A whole city block had been knocked down and the pavement was blocked off for about 400 yards and temporary crossing-places instituted. Clearly, some serious architecture was going up. Beverly Hills's architecture has a cheerful quality, though I suppose it might depress people with finer sensibilities than mine. There really is no there, there. 'It's kind of Spanish-Dutch,' your hostess will say, waving an arm. Or, 'It's kind of Mexican-Early-American-Gothic.' Uh- huh. When this new development is built on Rodeo Drive, it's going to beggar any hyphenated descriptions. From my distant vantage-point across the street I could see shimmering gold-leaf domes and cupolas, dazzling white marble columns, pediments crammed with relief carvings, arches, huge carved eagles with spread wings twice life-size perched on finials, walls of black glass. In Beverly Hills terms it was Class- ical Greek-Egyptian-Florentine-Roman- esque. Very expensive shops indeed. I watched a colossal crane delicately lower- ing some decorative bits and pieces on to the top of a tower while ant-sized workmen defied death to steer it into place, and it suddenly occurred to me that this was a campanile. I picked my way through the Keep Out signs and yellow tape and entered the building site.
I spent a wearisome year or two in Fleet Street while they were knocking it down to build those cheap-looking Japanese banks. Rain, mud and printers' ink flowed down the gutters, and on fine days the workmen would cluster 20-strong on the tiny pave- ments to drink beer and upset my secret- ary. The building site in Beverly Hills was a treat by comparison. The mess was con- tained, and the expensive materials gleamed in the sunshine: white and pink and black marble, black glass. None of the workmen was half-naked, none displayed buttocks-cleavage, all had name-badges and neat hard hats, none shouted, 'Ere, show us your tits, gel.'
I found a hard-hat with a clipboard. So American: he had a poser-phone as well. He was very busy and had no time to get to grips with an English accent. I asked him if the tower was a campanile. He said, 'No. Pedestrians aren't allowed in here, lady.' I persisted. `So it's not a bell-tower, that little domed edifice with the gold top?' 'No, lady, no bell.' I said, 'Oh, I just wondered, because I'm looking for a cam- panile and a fountain in Rodeo Drive,' and he summoned all his American patience to say, 'You from England?' Yes,' I said, holding onto the advantage, 'and I know a big Italian lady who doesn't speak English very well who told me she was making a fountain in front of a campanile on Rodeo Drive, so I'm looking for it.' He said, 'Lady, I'm looking for her. If you know a big Italian lady who doesn't speak English too well who makes fountains, can you tell 'Very good, now you're learning to channel your aggression.' her to get her butt over here? She's a week late. Her stuff's all there.'
In the very front of the development, tucked behind the hoardings, two work- men were on their knees in front of a garden-pond-sized basin, slapping it with black bitumen. Copper piping stuck out at angles and a six-foot wall sloped towards the basin. Surrounding them were a dozen heavy, rustic-looking wooden crates with the lids prised off. The crates had Italian writing on and were packed with wood- shavings, the wonderful smell of which, mixed with whiffs of tar, was quite heady. Michelangelo must have packed his stuff up in the same way. I pushed my hand into the wood-shavings and slid it along a creamy, soapy, curve of ochre-coloured travertino, warm to the touch: Silvana's fountain. It was in about 20 pieces: curves and lips and scallop-shell shapes, all rather monumental and terrifically solid and smooth, despite the little pitted holes in the surface of the stone. It's common for a scent or taste to make your heart leap or jerk you back 20 or 30 years, but I've never had it from touch before. Classical Greek- Egyptian-Florentine-Romanesque fell away, the glittering faces of Rodeo Drive and the stretch limos and the platinum Amexes and the Pretty Women fell away and I wanted to get back to Europe.
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