A hilltop villa in Ita with a strong founda
Marco Pasanella plans to split his time between Tuscany and Manhattan following historic inheritance
When Marco Pasanella was a boy, he began to spend summers in Tuscany, where his father, Giovanni Pasanella, an architect and former professor of architecture and urban design at Yale and Columbia universities in America, had moved in the 1970s. Eventually, Giovanni Pasanella bought an 18th-century hilltop villa overlooking Camaiore, a town near Lucca, settling there and returning to his first love, painting.
Marco Pasanella has fond memories of scrumptious, laid-back meals concocted by Lisetta Bianco Mueller, his father’s companion of 38 years, for a coterie of guests that often mixed artists and intellectuals with neighbours or someone’s visiting elderly aunt.
“It was just full of life,” said Pasanella, 59, who lives with his wife, Rebecca Robertson, 47, and their son, Luca, above their wine shop in the Seaport neighbourhood, on the southern tip of Manhattan. So many visitors converged on the villa that Lisetta bought food wholesale, and local suppliers “thought she had a hotel”, he said.
After Giovanni Pasanella died, his son inherited Villa Cannizzaro, as it was called, and with it memories floating from the remnants of past lives. Deciding what to keep and what to clean-sweep while making the villa their own was sometimes challenging and at times a delicate balancing act between preserving family heirlooms and traditions and making the villa fit with their 21st-century lifestyle.
“We’ve taken our time with how we’ve approached the house,” he said on a recent Sunday. “I didn’t want it to be too like a museum.”
The villa is the centrepiece of a property that is the epitome of a classical Tuscan landscape: perfectly manicured lawns, orchards of olive trees (enough to produce oil for the family and friends), sundry fruit trees and a sloping area behind the villa that was recently cleared so that the they could stroll through a pineta, a shady pine-tree promenade.
“A passeggiata in pineta is just pleasure,” Pasanella alliterated, using the Italian word for walk.
On one side of the villa is a bamboo grove that must be constantly kept in check lest it encroach too closely on some of the outer buildings on the estate. Giovanni Pasanella “encouraged” the bamboo, and it became one of his preferred painting subjects, Marco Pasanella said.
Nowadays, he has been mining the grove for a bamboo teahouse that he designed a few years ago as a hideaway for Luca. There’s a low window on one wall that looks out onto the town of Camaiore, and an open roof.
“One of the things Luca really likes is just looking up,” he said.
Luca is now days shy of 17, and this summer he and Pasanella plan to visit a local company that designs with bamboo and offers courses on its qualities so they might learn how to better preserve the teahouse.
Luca’s only complaint: bad Wi-Fi reception on the hill.
Pasanella is a designer of everything from housewares to hotels, and Robertson is an interior designer and stylist, by way of a long stint working for Martha Stewart. But at the villa, he said, they had wanted to avoid “coming in with design with a capital D”.
They had a good foundation to work with. The villa’s two main stories unfold in a series of airy rooms with vistas onto the gardens or surrounding hills. Some of Giovanni Pasanella’s pieces — bronze lamps topped with onyx shades, or sleek coffee tables made of fossilised marble originally designed for the Seagram office building in New York — anchor rooms that have retained many of the original furnishings.
“Mostly we did a lot of editing,” stashing excess furniture in the attic. “It was more like curating rather than a remake,” Pasanella said.
Giovanni Pasanella’s paintings are a leitmotif of the villa. A large abstract work he painted at 19 hangs in an upstairs salon, a solid counterpart to enormous frames on the three remaining walls where the couple have installed mirrors that open up the space to light and infinity.
Pasanella’s father’s studio, serenaded by birds, has become the main bedroom. But his spirit hovers. A long shelf on one wall is lined with jars of pigments, tin cans stuffed with paintbrushes and old turpentine cans. The artist’s study on the ground floor has remained mostly untouched. A bookcase features family photographs, including of Pasanella’s late mother, a sociologist; a beloved family dog’s ashes; and several birds’ nests and parts of beehives found on the property.
Despite their determination to avoid making the villa look like a museum, the couple have been sensitive to its history in their reclamation.
In the kitchen, they simply moved the original sink of grey Carrara marble under a window, replaced tiles around the fireplace and mantle with cipolin, a marble quarried in this area, and added more light, “a kind of Americanism that makes this room a little bit more comfortable”, Pasanella said. What was once a “utilitarian” kitchen became something “a little less ad hoc but keeping the spirit of the house”.
Food is stored in an original pantry, carved out of the massive walls.
“The kitchen person thought we were bananas; they said, ‘How come you don’t want to have a million cabinets?,’” (they certainly have the space for them), Pasanella said, adding that the kitchen was great as is. “You don’t need to reinvent everything.”
The substitution of a glazed metal bathtub in the bathroom on the ground floor — big enough to house a pool table — with a 600kg marble tub from a nearby town involved a crane and shoring up the floor underneath with steel beams. “It was a huge job to make it seem like we hadn’t done anything.”
The bathroom armoire — which could hold the bedding of a smallish boutique hotel — is a lesson in decluttering.
“That’s due to my wife, who spent 13 years working for Martha Stewart,” Pasanella said with a laugh.
Once Luca goes to college, Pasanella expects that he and his wife will spend more time here, although they will keep a foot in New York, because they love it, and they have their wine shop.
“We will find whatever that balance is,” he said.
As it is, Villa Cannizzaro is still a work in progress.
He is creating a space inside the bamboo grove, a quiet place for reflection, lulled by the slow tempo of rustling bamboo reeds.
“I want to develop it, make it better,” he said. “Not everything has to be done all at once.”