A View of Vizcaya

So what’s a guy to do on a rainy day in Hollywood, Florida? Not that I was sick of the sun or anything but I guess Mama Nature decided three days of fine weather was enough and on Monday we were visited by overcast skies with accompanying occasional spritzes from the strato-cumulus formations overhead which deterred even my speedo-motivated immersion in 75-degree water. So at the suggestion of my gracious host Bernardo, the Prince of Ecuador, we headed down to Miami (Coconut Grove to be exact) and spent a couple of hours strolling around Villa Vizcaya.

Vizcaya was plopped down on the shoreline of 180 acres of fallow fields near Miami between 1914 - 1916 (during it’s construction the population swelled by 1,000 since most of the workers had to be imported to what was then, essentially, a fairly forsaken backwater). The estate was built by a dude named James Deering who had inherited a vice presidency in the International Harvester Company and, for health reasons, needed to escape the wintry climes of Chicago and the Northeast. Vizcaya is a North Italian sixteenth-century style villa (Google informs me the Villa Rezzonico at Bassano del Grappa was the basic inspiration. That piece of obscure geographical trivia could probably have been discarded, but I liked the sound of it).

Deering seemed to have had zero taste in practically anything and hired advisors to accompany him to Europe where he more or less legally plundered castles and palaces (and villas); buying entire rooms, furnishings included, and having them transported back to Florida (sometimes intact; sometimes cut up into pieces and reassembled) where they were shoehorned into spaces designed specifically to hold them at Vizcaya. I think, despite what our knowledgeable tour guide espoused, Mr. Deering had only one thing going for him: money. Nonetheless the Villa is quite an unusual building in what is essentially a tropical southern climate. The house and gardens now sit on about 16 acres; the remainder of the land having been sold off after Deering’s death in the mid-1920’s and it is now the property of Miami-Dade County. It is a designated historical landmark and 35 of its 70 rooms are open to the public.

As a member of that public I am always filled with a slight unease when tromping around this sort of opulent construction, including San Simeon in Calif., the mansions along the Hudson in New York and, especially, the monolithic wedding cakes in Newport, Rhode Island. Maybe I have a basic communistic gene hidden in my psyche that, while admiring the result of it, I still object to the needless opulence and self indulgence they represent. Maybe I just don’t feel very welcome in a house that I would never have been invited to in its heyday; unless to fulfill my role as riffraff.

Nonetheless, visiting Vizcaya is a darn good way to spend an overcast, occasionally rainy afternoon in So. Florida; especially with buds who pay your (senior) way.