Senator Giustino Valmarana's family
Giustino Valmarana – the eldest of seven siblings – when he married (in 1921), chose the Foresteria as his home, which he shared with his wife Amalia, daughter of the Count Spingardi, and their children Paolo Andrea and Angelo. He recalls here: “The house has always been open to visitors, often with some inconveniences, since we’ve always lived here. Once, my mother was in bed sick, and my father had promised to send the doctor. A gentleman with glasses enters the bedroom, and she immediately pulls herself out of the sheets and begins to explain how she feels, where it hurts, and what her temperature is. The American tourist is surprised and embarrassed, thinking it’s one of those eccentricities of these somewhat crazy Italian nobles. Then comes the explanation, and it’s my mother who’s embarrassed…”
(Daniela Pasti – La Repubblica “Dinner with the Tiepolos,” June 23, 1985)
Giustino Valmarana
Goffredo Parise, very close to Giustino, tells of a time when they were having coffee in the garden and a group of tourists arrived at the villa gate. The homeowner escorted them on the visit, without waiting for the caretaker to do so. Polite but annoyed by the interruption, once the visitors left, he sat back down next to his friend, muttering under his breath…
A strange example of a Venetian, a Catholic, and a Christian Democrat – he was a deputy to the Constituent Assembly and a senator for four terms – Giustino Valmarana was known for his sharp wit – Parise describes him as Voltairean – and for his independence of judgment.
…”Dad, who would later become an extraordinarily cheerful and extroverted person, suffered his anti-fascism in solitude and silence. And so, no one spoke of politics or anything else, they didn’t read the newspapers, they didn’t listen to the radio, they didn’t live a communal life to avoid interacting with those who, in one way or another, could remind him of a situation that Dad had decided to banish from his reality. Even all Italian literature, guilty of being Italian and therefore, in some way, fascist, was not allowed in the house.”
(Paolo Valmarana from the story L’angoscia del petto di pollo)
Amalia Spingardi
Amalia was the daughter of General Paolo Spingardi, who in 1909 was the Minister of War, a senator, and a Knight of the Order of the Holy Annunciation, a high and rare privilege granted by Victor Emmanuel, which equated the recipient to the rank of the king’s cousin.
“There was always only one Countess Amalia in Vicenza for all of us: Amalia of Valmarana; inventing another would be impossible, as she was so unique in the mythology of the women of my city, with whom my generation had relations of admiration, veneration, and friendship. Amalia remains a countess, for all of us, even though she couldn’t care less about being one. She was born in Turin to a general who was a Knight of the Annunciation, Paolo Spingardi, who was a war minister four times… until the referendum, she held monarchist views, but – to put it grandly – in the Einaudi way! With a sense of freedom, democracy, and reality that later allowed her to be a loyal republican and, for ten years, the head of the Italian Women’s Center, where she poured out unsuspected organizational and constructive qualities. She had a spirit of tolerance equal to her energy, a natural wisdom that was nourished by a spontaneous religion, not prejudiced or bigoted, and an incredible work ethic, even though until 1946, she had only known one kind of presidency: that of a maternal home… Of Venetian aristocrats (the real ones…), she had the kindness, simplicity, discretion, and refinement, the ability to sense the problems of others, a participatory benevolence, tolerance for the troubles of others, and even the joyful familiarity and intuition of their little quirks.”
(Antonio Barolini Il Giornale di Vicenza, January 1967)
Angelo and Paolo Valmarana
Angelo Valmarana chose to spend his entire life in Vicenza, a highly esteemed and refined host at the Foresteria. He recalls: “We were also related to Fogazzaro, the husband of a Valmarana daughter, who took my great-grandmother Pina as a model for the Marchioness Nene when he wrote Piccolo mondo moderno (which describes)… the sleepy life of a provincial nobility, summers spent in Velo d’Astico, long autumns spent in country villas whose external grandeur did not match the extreme frugality with which the family fortune was managed, stays that extended until the end of November when, at San Martino, they would settle accounts with the tenants. A microcosm where engagements, marriages, mésalliances, and inheritances became the subject of passionate gossip and inexhaustible resentments. The children were kept in check by austere German governesses; for one of them, Felicitas Buchner, Antonio Fogazzaro harbored a secret love… A life I had time to know in my childhood; …in the fall, we would move to the villa in Lonedo, the first villa built by Palladio, the one where Visconti filmed Senso. The house… which had more than a hundred rooms, was frescoed by the students of Veronese, my father sold it twenty years ago, without telling us… it was a wise decision, it was impossible to maintain.”
(Daniela Pasti – La Repubblica, “Tutti a cena con i Tiepolo,” June 23, 1985)
Paolo Valmarana
Following his great passion for cinema, Paolo moved to Rome at a very young age.
“… despite the apparent Venetian indolence, despite the disenchanted Catholic wisdom that measured all things in this world by the unyielding standard of eternity (PV), he was rich in genuine enthusiasm, full of versatile vitality… He was cheerful in those years (of protest), witty, brilliant, and ironic; he could even find the comic and paradoxical sides in the climate of war, and had a serene confidence in reason that allowed him never to interrupt the dialogue. At that time, and for the rest of his years, he worked at Rai, never embarrassed by being identified as a Christian Democrat, on the contrary, proud to be a critic for Il Popolo, but at the same time unwilling to give up the freedom of his judgment and even his taste.
As a man of cinema, he acted without prejudice and without sectarianism… and as evident in the results of his collaborations with Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and later with the Taviani brothers, Elio Petri, Ermanno Olmi, and Nanni Moretti. When the world seemed to split in two, like during a civil war, he stubbornly opposed any reckoning, and in the end, he triumphed because the dialogue endured, despite the tragedies of the Seventies.”
(Cesare de’ Michelis, Il Gazzettino, “Fiori di Carta”, 1994)
Carolina, Cecilia, and Camilla Valmarana
Daughters of Paolo Andrea and heirs of their father and their brother Angelo, they inherited the entire area of the Foresteria upon Angelo’s death in 2004.
Carolina left Milan with her family in 2005 to manage the Villa. In 2023, Villa Valmarana ai Nani won the PNRR M1C3 Parks and Historic Gardens grant, of which Carolina is the project manager. Thanks to the contributions from the call for proposals, it was possible to renew the entire green area, restore the external architectures (including the Pagoda), and open the Bosco, equipping it with new vegetation and multimedia installations.
