The light
Beeswax candles on every table, wall lamps dimmed by hand, and not one spotlight over a plate. By midnight the room is lit almost entirely by flame.
Home / The Palazzo
The palazzo, room by room
Four years of restoration, Veronese craftsmen, and a capacity kept deliberately small. This page is about the building, and about the way an evening moves through it.
The palazzo
I
The building
Brought back by hand, not by machine
The palazzo went up in 1897 and spent a century as a private house, then as a violin-maker's workshop, and finally as a store room. When we found it, the coffered ceilings were still intact under three coats of lime wash.
The restoration took four years and involved Veronese craftsmen who still work in lime, plaster and reclaimed timber. We added nothing the building did not already have — we took away what had been laid on top of it.
- The great room, with a fireplace in red Verona marble and its original cornices.
- The library, ten covers, kept for the quietest dinners of the week.
- The winter garden, its ironwork rebuilt from period drawings.
- A vaulted cellar in which the temperature moves three degrees across a year.
- Capacity held on purpose at thirty-eight covers per service.
The atmosphere of the evening
The light drops, the tempo changes
An evening here is set like a score: the light falls half a tone every hour, service slows after the second course, and the piano takes over from the silence at ten. Nobody will tell you when to get up.
The table
Hand-washed linen, white porcelain without decoration, mouth-blown glass. A table is laid in front of the guest, not hours before.
The quiet
No background music before nine. The walls were treated so that the table beside you cannot follow your conversation.
The great room
Evenings with a theme
A different appointment every week
Some nights are simply dinner. Others have a reason, and the reason is usually someone who grew, pressed or wrote something worth an hour of the evening.
- Growers' Wednesday — whoever farms or makes the wine sits at the table and talks.
- Amarone verticals — five vintages from one vineyard, once a month.
- Reading dinners — a Veronese author reads between the second course and dessert.
- Piano evenings — live repertoire on the last Friday of the month.
- Summer in the garden — service outdoors from June to September.