In Memoriam - Giancarlo Bianchini (1935-2011)

My father wanted to be an architect. Knowing he would inherit a substantial country estate, his widowed mother insisted, however, that he study agriculture. Papa did as he was told – yet I believe a passion for houses drove his life.

Upon marrying, he and my mother moved from Rome to Umbria where our family properties were located. The castellated walls of Collevalenza were the ancestral home - mostly used during holidays, hardly suitable for long Umbrian winters, and an unlikely house in which a fashionable young couple might take up permanent residence.

My parents, thus confined to an unappealing and uncomfortable home, moved from wing to wing at first, seeking comfort. Finally they installed central heating and redesigned rooms to suit themselves.

A gloomy passageway was returned to its former volume by tearing down partitions. A housepainter - one of a rare breed of décor masters still able to be found in the 1960’s - painted the walls Pompeian red with marbleized doorframes and cartouches of trompe l’oeil. An elegant green and gold palette was chosen for the paneled double doors, and eight massive ‘papal’ armchairs were placed around the hall, surmounted by portraits of our ancestors. Although having no utilitarian function, as is often the case in Italian seigniorial buildings, the redesigned room restored a continuity between the suite of salons and chambers on the castle’s piano nobile. Their joint creation was a success - evidence that in those first years of marriage, my parents could find solutions together with balance and harmony.

As his family grew to seven children, papa ferried us in summer to the Apennines, in a Benedictine abbey bought in 1904 by his grandfather. At its purchase, the building was dilapidated and lacking every modern comfort: no electricity, no running water. My earliest memories are of fetching water in jugs from a mountain spring, and of acetylene lamps and candles burning through the night. My parents worked in tandem to turn a small shepherd’s cottage next to the former church into a cozy family retreat. They had little money and what they achieved was a labor of love, the fruit of their resourceful creativity. I remember helping papa by handing him tiles to roof a rustic porch, still there forty years on.

In the early 1980’s, after a lengthy restoration and many weekends spent building a facsimile with Lego blocks, my father moved us from the castle of Collevalenza to a nearby family property, a large fortified farmhouse commanding the top of a hill. It would be a house of his dreams, aesthetics, and comfort; with plenty of living space on the ground floor, terraces and porticoes in every direction, more bathrooms than we’d ever seen. When La Cervara became too expensive to heat a buyer was found and my father started hunting for a new home.

I accompanied him on his first visit to Porchiano, the house of Axel Munthe’s grandson, Guy, who had died a few years earlier, aged only 49. Before his death, Munthe had been able to complete a long and passionate restoration of an ancient watchtower overlooking the Tiber. The building and grounds bespoke a singular man with tremendously personal relations with houses, in line with his family tradition of house lovers and makers. Curiously, his grandfather’s Story of San Michele (the account of the creation of Villa San Michele in Anacapri) was a favorite of my parents who read it aloud to each other during their early difficult times at Collevalenza. In spite of this coincidence, and because of the weird configuration of the watchtower, I thought my father would discard this option - not knowing or fully understanding him and his inscrutable sentimentality.

Porchiano became papa’s Sans Souci, the house into which he poured most of himself. He was forced to undertake great changes to accommodate our large family. To start with, new bathrooms had to be installed, more bedrooms added, and a real kitchen created. Proper stone stairways were built to replace quirky spiral staircases of metal. Every year papa would set upon a new major project: a passage through the five-foot thick wall toward the western terrace, a swimming pool in a remote corner of the garden, an elevator to ease the ascent of a six story house.

In recent years, after completing at our mountain retreat the extensive restoration of the abbey of San Pietro, he turned his attention again to the grounds of Porchiano. He loved formal gardens: the simplicity of Italianate patterns, the rigor of the geometry; the surprise to step from one ‘green room’ into another best reflect his personality. He designed pergolas, pathways, hedges, fountains; even canvas canopies to be raised over summer banquets.

The Arabs say ‘a man who is able to create a garden has fulfilled his mission in life.’ I like to think that the gardens of Porchiano were my father’s best accomplishment.