When I was in grade eleven at St Michaels College School in Toronto, one of our assignments in English class was “Tuscan Villa,” a long poem by Douglas LePan. I remember this poem because it was very rare to see any high school text that referred to Italy in any way. Our English teacher explained that Mr LePan had served as an artilleryman in the Canadian Army during the Allies’ Italian campaign in 1943-44, fighting the Nazi German forces. LePan spent many days in the region of Tuscany observing the devastation to large buildings such as churches and villas.
I was born in a town in Italy called Tezze sul Brenta, near the Brenta River, which flows south into the Venice lagoon. This river is well-known for the many Venetian villas that line its shores; some are huge palaces of over one hundred rooms such as the Villa Pisani at Stra. So a poem about an Italian villa half-destroyed by artillery fire made a lasting impression on me. I have seen many villas in Tuscany near cities like Siena, Lucca, Florence, Arezzo and San Gimignano. Everyone of them started out as a fortress and only later were some of them expanded into villas with chapels and gardens or a monastery. At one time or other all these cities were in conflict with one another, so many villas were already scarred by artillery battles long before the Canadian Army arrived in Italy. In his poem, LePan suggests the continuing conflicts witnessed by his Tuscan villa with these lines:
The end of an age
And the end of an afternoon
Are one and the same to grinding fortune
In contrast to the thick fortress walls of many Tuscan villas, the Venetian villas were designed with classical columns in the fashion of a Greek or Roman building. The material often used was white marble over stone or brick. The major architect for this period in the life of the Venetian Republic was Andrea Palladio (1508-80). He created 33 villas, 27 palaces and 18 churches that influenced architecture in the rest of Europe and North America. These elegant villas are not what LePan was describing in his poems.
Douglas LePan’s wartime experiences in Italy are the source of much of his poetry such as “Tuscan Villa,” “Elegy for the Romagna,” “Below Monte Cassino,” and his novel, The Deserter (1964). He observes the death of men around him and the destruction of beautiful historic buildings, and he hopes against the hopeless in his “Elegy.”
From our unravelled tissues,
To spin an intellectual thread, no more
Mercurial nor more pure than this so precious crew,
That mounting, mounting, breaking, respun, as thin
As starlight, perhaps at last might clasp the upper air
And there restore relation and identity.
After the war, LePan went into the diplomatic service for the Canadian government, leaving this work in 1959 and returning to teaching. From 1964 to 1970 he taught English at the University of Toronto. Michael Ondaatje was a student there and earned a BA in English in 1965; then he earned an MA from Queen’s University in Kingston. LePan was awarded a Governor General’s Award in 1964 for his novel The Deserter, so Ondaatje must have been aware of LePan’s writing about the war in Italy.
In his introduction to a new edition of The Deserter in 2019, Scott Rayter writes: “Those eighteen months with the Royal Canadian Artillery provided the fodder both for early and more decorous poems, such as “Tuscan Villa” and “Elegy for the Romagna” (the former serving as the inspiration for Michael Ondaatje’s setting in The English Patient)…”
This type of literary influence is a classic example of Comparative Canadian Literature which Ondaatje would have been made aware of during his three years at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec. There he worked with his mentor D.G. Jones who encouraged him to write more poetry. Ondaatje won his first Governor General’s Award in 1970 for his poetry book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.
The Villa Pisani at Stra on the Brenta River near Venice is an example of large Venetian villas. © Luca Lorenzelli | Dreamstime.com
In 1992, Michael Ondaatje published The English Patient, a novel set mostly in Italy, in a Tuscan villa half-devastated by the battles going on around it. Ondaatje’s setting is the Villa San Girolamo in the hill town of Fiesole which overlooks the city of Florence six kilometres to the south. The complex includes living quarters, a Catholic monastery and a church. There is no high bell tower as we have in “Tuscan Villa” and with which LePan begins his poem:
As the winds veer
The weathervane smiles
But the bell in the lofty belfry
No longer tells the hour
In the sunlight perfect as a tear.
In his novel, Ondaatje describes the ruins of the building as a fortress:
… Just above it is the Villa San Girolamo, previously a nunnery, whose castle-like battlements made it the last stronghold of the German army… Sections of the chapel were blown up. Parts of the top story of the villa crumpled under explosion … the steps leading to the third level were sealed off, though a section of chimney and roof survived.
The nurse Hana, who is caring for the character of the English patient, wanders through the bombed-out shell of the villa in the darkness. She has found the library where she selects books to read to him. Many of the rooms down the dark halls are closed off for fear that they were booby-trapped by the retreating German soldiers. When it rains, water leaks into several rooms including the library, destroying some of the books. This squat collection of buildings is a villa in name only. Ondaatje writes:
They used only essential candlelight at night because of the brigands who annihilated everything they came across. They were protected by the simple fact that the villa seemed a ruin.
The author repeatedly describes the villa as a fortification.
The Villa San Girolamo, built to protect inhabitants from the flesh and the devil, had the look of a besieged fortress, the limbs of most of the statues blown off during the first days of shelling… The last mediaeval war was fought in Italy in 1943 and 1944. Fortress towns on the great promontories which had been battled over since the eighth century had the armies of new kings flung carelessly against them.
When British-Italian director Anthony Minghella searched out locations for the filming in 1997 of The English Patient, he could not use the Villa San Girolamo since it had been restored as a modern tourist attraction in the town of Fiesole. Instead, he found an unspoilt monastic complex in Sant’Anna in Camprena near the town of Pienza. There the dramatic scenes of Hana, with her English patient and her friends Caravaggio and Kip, are played out. In addition to the monastery, there is an ancient abbey church, a cemetery and gardens; each play their roles in the film. However, we would not call this austere group of buildings a villa.
As a contrast to the darkness of the old villa, Minghella needed more dramatic colour. When Kip takes Hana to see the fresco of the Madonna, the scene was actually shot in the Bacci Chapel in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, which houses a large fresco by Piero Della Francesca from 1466. Hana is hoisted up towards the ceiling to get the full effect of the Madonna icon.
This scene may remind some viewers of Fellini’s Roma* in which some construction workers, digging a subway tunnel, blunder into a buried Roman villa. As they descend into the cavity to view the artwork with awe, the faces begin to fade and disappear due to the Roman smog.
Minghella’s film begins in Egypt, where Katharine Clifton meets Count Almasy and they begin an affair. The film director could not use the original Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, as in the book, since it was destroyed by fire in the 1950s. As a stand-in he chose the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido of Venice, a long barrier island facing out across the Adriatic Sea. So, we are back in a familiar Venetian palazzo.
Near the end of his career LePan published Macalister, or Dying in Darkness (1995), based on the life of the Canadian scholar and soldier Ken Macalister who volunteered for the British Special Operations Executive. He was parachuted into occupied France to help the French resistance. He was captured by the Germans and later killed in Buchenwald concentration camp. In The English Patient, both Almasy and Caravaggio are suspected of having acted as spies during the war.
At the end of the Second World War there were many abandoned monasteries, nunneries and old villas across Italy. Following the prosperity that came with Italy’s “economic miracle” in the 1960s and 1970s, some of these old buildings were resurrected as boutique hotels, cooking schools, community centres for seniors, university buildings, artist colonies, and summer vacation homes for wealthy Europeans. Actor George Clooney and his wife Amal own the Villa Oleandra in the village of Laglio on Lake Como. And many Russian oligarchs have purchased luxury villas in Italy as a means to escape Putin’s war between Ukraine and Russia.
Italian villas appear in many works by Canadian authors. In Morley Callaghan’s 1961 novel A Passion in Rome, we visit Castel Gandolfo and the Villa Barberini, the summer residence of the pope and his guests. Morley Callaghan’s son Barry edited the volume Canadian Travellers in Italy, which includes selections from the works of sixty Canadian writers such as Irving Layton, Mavis Gallant, Leonard Cohen, and Margaret Atwood, as well as descriptions of other Italian villas.
Vancouver poet Phyllis Webb takes us to Tuscan villas with her poem In a Garden of the Pitti Palace; A Pagan Cantata (1961). Her subsequent poem “Duino Castle” is dedicated to Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The Pitti Palace is in the centre of Florence, while Duino Castle is on the Adriatic coast just north of the city of Trieste.
The Vancouver author Robyn Harding published her mystery novel, Strangers in the Villa in 2026, but the narrative is set in southern Spain rather than Italy. However, it may in part have been inspired by Ondaatje’s brooding Italian villa.
Toronto novelist Darlene Madott wrote “An Afternoon in the Garden of the Palazzo Barberini” included in her collection Stations of the Heart (2021). This garden, in the centre of Rome is known as “The Secret Garden,” since it cannot be seen clearly from the palazzo, which was completed in 1633.
In the wartime novel, The Cipher by Genni Gunn, after the Allies land in southern Italy, agents of the Special Operations Executive occupied various palazzi such as Villa Grazia and Castello di Santo Stefano near Monopoli, as well as villas near Pescara and Bari.
The Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio (Lake Como), built in the 15th century, became the property of the Rockefeller Foundation of New York in 1959 and today is a centre for artists, scientists, scholars and politicians to meet and exchange ideas. © Castenoid | Dreamstime.com
The most beautiful villas in Italy are in Bellagio on Lake Como in Lombardy. In the Villa Serbelloni the American Rockefeller Foundation has established a centre for artists, scientists, scholars and politicians to meet and exchange ideas. The Black-Canadian author George Elliott Clarke was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1998 so that he could complete his verse play Beatrice Chancy about slavery in Nova Scotia in the early 1800s. The work was later performed as a chamber opera in Halifax, Toronto, Edmonton, and broadcast on CBC television. At another time, Canadian scholars Linda and Michael Hutcheon were also at Bellagio working on one of their books on the themes in opera and literature.
The English Patient resulted in a very powerful and commercially successful movie: it had intrigue, romance, betrayal, violence, hidden identity, and tragic death. And like the location for a destination wedding or the setting for an opera, the villa has a strong presence throughout the narrative and the film.
In the acknowledgements at the end of the novel, Ondaatje lists the people and institutions that helped him research his novel; these include York University, The Villa Serbelloni, the Rockefeller Foundation, Sister Margaret at the Villa San Girolamo, and Douglas LePan!
*A word of gratitude to George Elliott Clarke for the reference to Fellini’s Roma.
