English
Documentation
Ten years amidst scaffolding and bricklayers
Pilar Urbano
Saint Josemaría traveled to Rome for the first time in 1946. Later he decided to establish the central headquarters of Opus Dei in Rome. The following extract tells of the search for a suitable property, and the adventures of beginning to build. It is taken from El Hombre de Villa Tevere by Pilar Urbano, Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 1995, Chapter 4.
The house of the head of a family
They scoured Rome for a house. Not just any old house: they did not want a hut, or a palace, or a mansion, or a barracks, or a hotel, or an office-block. It had to be a home for the head of a family, a very large family. It was to be the permanent headquarters of Opus Dei, a dignified place with plenty of room and with the potential for further building, since in the future men and women from all over the world would come to live there, to study and be formed in the spirit of the Work.
In an antique shop in Piazza di Spagna Father Escriva and Don Alvaro spotted a beautiful Baroque wooden statue of the Madonna. It was very cheap – eight thousand lira, or about six dollars. Thinking ahead to the new house, it was a bargain they did not want to miss. But it took them more than a month to scrape together enough money.
Father Escriva did not have a fairy godmother or open-handed sponsor behind him. At that moment the vocations to the Work in Italy could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Spain the Work had been established in Madrid, Barcelona, Saragossa, Valencia, Bilbao, Granada, Valladolid and Santiago. However, the young women who lived in Los Rosales, apart from studying, had to rear chickens and grow vegetables so as to feed themselves. The men in Molinoviejo, likewise, were combining their studies with building an extension and setting up a small farm. Recently-graduated architects, engineers, physicists, lawyers and mathematicians were not above battling with hens, pigs or cows. They swept up coal dust, mixed it with plaster, and used it to feed the boiler for the central heating. In the kitchen they invented some sophisticated hamburgers – made of rice, cooked and mashed. These were unusual ways of making do, but it is a true picture of the financial management of Opus Dei in those early years.
Post-war Italy was a strange aristocratic republic where destitute but dignified princesses, dukes, counts and marquises swarmed in the impoverished salons of what had been high society. Some of them were well up on the news of houses to rent, small palaces being disposed of, furniture going for auction, tapestries, lamps and pictures for sale. These sales were all made privately and discreetly by people who did not want their new poverty to show, and things went for a handful of lira.
One day the telephone rang in Città Leonina. Duchess Virginia Sforza-Cesarini was on the line. The person who answered the telephone, surprised, made gestures of enquiry to the others in the house. No-one knew her.
“I have been told you are looking for a villa, a residence,” she said. “Maybe I know one that would suit you. I would be delighted to invite you to tea in my house.”
Father Escriva and Don Alvaro paid a visit. The Duchess Sforza-Cesarini was a charming, gracious lady, but the offer she made them on behalf of a third party did not interest them. It had several disadvantages, among them the fact that the house in question was outside Rome. Father Escriva used the visit to talk to the duchess about the love of God, a life of prayer, and the value of suffering. Then he explained Opus Dei to her, what the range of its apostolates would be throughout the whole world, and how this task had to be directed from the heart of the Church, in Rome.
Virginia Sforza was impressed, and offered to help in their search for a house. A few days later she contacted them again: “I have seen something which I think you will find interesting.” It was a large villa, with a garden which could be built on, in the Parioli district of Rome. It belonged to another aristocrat, Count Gori Mazzoleni, who wanted to sell up and leave Italy. The house had been let to the Hungarian ambassador to the Holy See, but this diplomatic representation had come to an end as diplomatic ties between the Hungarian communist government and the Vatican State had been broken off. The owner wished to sell as soon as possible, without using agents.
Father Escriva, Alvaro del Portillo, Salvador Canals and a fourth person went to see the villa. It was on the corner of Viale Bruno Buozzi and Via di Villa Sacchetti. The garden went down as far as Via Domenico Cirillo. Count Gori Mazzoleni received them in the porter’s lodge where he was living, since the main house was still occupied by civil servants and employees of the Hungarian Legation, who were staying on there illegally (and would continue to do so for two more years). Father Escriva liked the situation of the house, the extent of the land which could be built on, and the quattrocento Florentine style of the main building. He asked Don Alvaro to go ahead with arranging the purchase. As they had no money, their only possible method was to buy the property by making a symbolic down payment. Then they would get a mortgage on it and use it to pay off the Count.
Don Alvaro, Salvador Canals and a lawyer friend, Dr. Merlini, negotiated with the owner and came to an agreement. They achieved such a reduction on the initial price that it almost seemed a gift. Two or three years later the property would be worth thirty or forty times as much. But the fact was that even though it was a small amount, at the time they did not have the money. They resorted to asking everyone they knew for help. They managed to persuade the owner of the villa to formalise the sale without any money, giving him as a pledge a few gold coins which they had been keeping to make a sacred vessel with. As they did not want to lose these, they stipulated in the contract that the gold coins should be returned when they paid the total amount. They committed themselves to finalising the deal within two months. Gori Mazzoleni’s only condition was for payment to be made in Swiss francs. He was content to wait until the buyers got the money together. When the contract was finally signed, in the early hours of the morning, Don Alvaro and Salvador Canals returned to the apartment in Città Leonina to find Father Escriva waiting for them, not just awake but on his knees, praying in the oratory.
“He accepted the gold coins – and he’s giving us two months!” they said. “His only condition is that the payment must be made in Swiss francs.”
Father Escriva started to laugh and shrugged his shoulders, surprised and amused. “We don’t care! We have neither lira nor francs, and one currency is the same as another for Our Lord.” Later on, asking his daughters to pray for this matter, he said with a mischievous wink, “Mind you get the currency right: it has to be in Swiss francs.”
Payment had not yet been made when Count Gori Mazzoleni met Encarnita Ortega and Concha Andres one day on the streets of Rome. He stopped his car and gave them a lift to Città Leonina. On the way he praised Don Alvaro to the skies: “To me, he’s not just an honest person with whom I’ve made a deal; he’s a loyal friend, a wise counsellor, and an admirable priest.”
Some time later, when the people of the Work had moved to the villa on Bruno Buozzi Street and were living in the lodge, the Count went to visit them. He was taken into what had been his house, and seeing the gloss on the floor, he asked Salvador Canals, “Have you changed the floor?”
“No, it’s the same one, but clean.”
The Count might have said the same some time later, if he had visited the main house: some of the walls had been washed, others had been covered in cloth, though not where big pictures were going to be hung, so as to save material. The people of the Work themselves did most of the decorating, painting ceilings, beams and door frames. They were the same rooms but they had been thoroughly cleaned and artistically painted.
“Where shall I sleep tonight?”
From July 1947 until February 1949 when the Hungarian “tenants” eventually left the villa, the people of the Work lived on the two floors of the lodge. Upstairs were the kitchen, laundry and dining room; downstairs, the Residence, “Il Pensionato”.
There were few rooms and many people living there. Every square metre was used intensively in many ways. At times they had the impression of being on a bus in the rush hour. There was only one bed which had legs and a mattress; at night, people unrolled bed-rolls, as if they were camping. Later on Father Escriva would recall this strange, cramped way of living without dramatizing the situation, and even humorously: “As we had no money, we did not turn on the heating. Neither did we have a place to sleep. We didn’t know where we would sleep at night – inside the hall-door, in one corner or another. There was just one bed and we reserved it for anyone who was ill. Like St Alexis, we lived under the stairs.”
During the day, everyone helped with the building and decorating; they also studied, went to classes at the Pontifical universities and carried out an intense apostolate with their university classmates. Soon Opus Dei spread to several Italian cities: Turin, Bari, Genoa, Milan, Naples and Palermo.
The Opus Dei “banker”
In addition to the difficulties of paying for the property and food for those living there, there was the expense of the building alterations in progress. For the next few years they lived amidst diggers, scaffolding and pickaxes, as well as the comings and goings of foremen, bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers and so on. All these workmen had to be paid every Saturday, no matter what, at one-fifteen p.m.
Don Alvaro bore the brunt of this. He obtained credit, signed bills of exchange, and borrowed money. He himself told a little – not everything – of the difficulties they faced in order to pay for the building materials and give the workers a fair weekly wage: “The first time we managed to pay them without any problems as we had saved up a bit of money, but by the second time, we couldn’t. So we began to search all over Rome for people who would lend us the money we needed. One person did offer to help, but the next day he came back to say he would have to mortgage his property, which was a step out of all proportion to the amount we were asking for. So we had lost a day. Saturday was looming, and the workers had to be paid come what may.
“In the end we spoke to a lawyer called Merlini, a man with a beard which really suited him, a good, devout Catholic and a competent jurist. He had helped us to buy the house, and in many other negotiations. ‘This time,’ he said, ‘it so happens that I have some money left with me by a client, which he has given me the use of for a year.’ He lent it to us at no interest, and it was enough for two weeks’ wages. Then Our Lord saw to it that we should manage with bills of exchange and a certain amount of juggling. It was a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul: a kind of madness, and a source of great stress. How did we manage? It was a miracle. I don’t know how, but we always paid.”
In the end they found a construction company belonging to Leonardo Castelli. He studied the work already under way, as well as the plans of the projected buildings. He could see it was not just a makeshift job, but something that had to be done thoroughly, a project which was to last for centuries. He trusted Don Alvaro’s goodness and honesty. He decided to take over the contract; from then on Castelli would pay the workers’ wages every week. He even increased the number of workmen to speed up the job. Don Alvaro had to meet Castelli’s bill at the end of every two or three months. The debt was no less, but they had more time to find the money.
However, no-one slackened their efforts; in fact they all tightened their belts. They got up at the crack of dawn because they had to walk to the universities, to save the trolley-bus or tram fares. On these long walks they wore rope-soled sandals and carried their shoes in a bag so as not to wear their shoes out.
The building work on the house in Bruno Buozzi Street increased. They were still living in the lodge which they called Il Pensionato, “the boarding-house”.
As he was not suffering from a craze for building, and also because he was keener on finishing things than beginning them, Father Escrivá always refused to bless foundation stones. In the case of the building on Bruno Buozzi Street, he held a simple ceremony to bless the last stone of the group of buildings that made up Villa Tevere. It consisted of the sign of the Cross and the recital of a Te Deum, followed by a cheerful “Auguri, everybody! siamo arrivati! – we’re here!” It was 9th January 1960, and pouring with rain.
What was Villa Tevere? It was the house of a paterfamilias, the father of a big, hard-working, poor family. It was a fine, large house, simple and unpretentious in style.
What had been a large garden was now built over. More storeys had been added, and several floors below ground level. The complex was neat and well-balanced, by no means monumental or imposing. The classic Florentine style of the original “old house”, Villa Vecchia, had been maintained. The different levels meant that there were lots of staircases, short bridges and connecting corridors.
Literary invention came to the fore in choosing a name for every corner, every bend in the corridor, every little interior patio. Thus the cortili, tiny inner courtyards, took their attractive-sounding names from little ornamental details in them: del Fiume, della Palla, dei Cantori, delle Tartarughe, del Cipresso – the courtyards of the river, the ball, the singers, the tortoises, and the cypress, respectively. A photographer would find it hard to encompass any given aspect in all its details without a special lens. Everything there was as varied as it was compact. You could pass by what they called the Fontana della Navicella or delle Cannelle - the “fountain of the small ship” or “of the springs”, without even realising they were there.
But for those who lived in Villa Tevere, each place had its intimate history. Every stone was an open book, reflecting memories of a time spent close to Father Escriva. “This is where the Father told me ...” “How often the Father, standing in front of this image of Our Lady, would ...” “When we painted the fresco on that wall, the Father helped ...” They were the background to his life, and all of them inseparably linked to the epic of the Work itself: a marble slab; bare footprints, showing the start of a route; the Guardian Angel of Opus Dei; the cheerful inscription with the words “Omnia in bonum” telling the onlooker that “everything is for the best”.
They scoured Rome for a house. Not just any old house: they did not want a hut, or a palace, or a mansion, or a barracks, or a hotel, or an office-block. It had to be a home for the head of a family, a very large family. It was to be the permanent headquarters of Opus Dei, a dignified place with plenty of room and with the potential for further building, since in the future men and women from all over the world would come to live there, to study and be formed in the spirit of the Work.
In an antique shop in Piazza di Spagna Father Escriva and Don Alvaro spotted a beautiful Baroque wooden statue of the Madonna. It was very cheap – eight thousand lira, or about six dollars. Thinking ahead to the new house, it was a bargain they did not want to miss. But it took them more than a month to scrape together enough money.
Father Escriva did not have a fairy godmother or open-handed sponsor behind him. At that moment the vocations to the Work in Italy could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Spain the Work had been established in Madrid, Barcelona, Saragossa, Valencia, Bilbao, Granada, Valladolid and Santiago. However, the young women who lived in Los Rosales, apart from studying, had to rear chickens and grow vegetables so as to feed themselves. The men in Molinoviejo, likewise, were combining their studies with building an extension and setting up a small farm. Recently-graduated architects, engineers, physicists, lawyers and mathematicians were not above battling with hens, pigs or cows. They swept up coal dust, mixed it with plaster, and used it to feed the boiler for the central heating. In the kitchen they invented some sophisticated hamburgers – made of rice, cooked and mashed. These were unusual ways of making do, but it is a true picture of the financial management of Opus Dei in those early years.
Post-war Italy was a strange aristocratic republic where destitute but dignified princesses, dukes, counts and marquises swarmed in the impoverished salons of what had been high society. Some of them were well up on the news of houses to rent, small palaces being disposed of, furniture going for auction, tapestries, lamps and pictures for sale. These sales were all made privately and discreetly by people who did not want their new poverty to show, and things went for a handful of lira.
One day the telephone rang in Città Leonina. Duchess Virginia Sforza-Cesarini was on the line. The person who answered the telephone, surprised, made gestures of enquiry to the others in the house. No-one knew her.
“I have been told you are looking for a villa, a residence,” she said. “Maybe I know one that would suit you. I would be delighted to invite you to tea in my house.”
Father Escriva and Don Alvaro paid a visit. The Duchess Sforza-Cesarini was a charming, gracious lady, but the offer she made them on behalf of a third party did not interest them. It had several disadvantages, among them the fact that the house in question was outside Rome. Father Escriva used the visit to talk to the duchess about the love of God, a life of prayer, and the value of suffering. Then he explained Opus Dei to her, what the range of its apostolates would be throughout the whole world, and how this task had to be directed from the heart of the Church, in Rome.
Virginia Sforza was impressed, and offered to help in their search for a house. A few days later she contacted them again: “I have seen something which I think you will find interesting.” It was a large villa, with a garden which could be built on, in the Parioli district of Rome. It belonged to another aristocrat, Count Gori Mazzoleni, who wanted to sell up and leave Italy. The house had been let to the Hungarian ambassador to the Holy See, but this diplomatic representation had come to an end as diplomatic ties between the Hungarian communist government and the Vatican State had been broken off. The owner wished to sell as soon as possible, without using agents.
Father Escriva, Alvaro del Portillo, Salvador Canals and a fourth person went to see the villa. It was on the corner of Viale Bruno Buozzi and Via di Villa Sacchetti. The garden went down as far as Via Domenico Cirillo. Count Gori Mazzoleni received them in the porter’s lodge where he was living, since the main house was still occupied by civil servants and employees of the Hungarian Legation, who were staying on there illegally (and would continue to do so for two more years). Father Escriva liked the situation of the house, the extent of the land which could be built on, and the quattrocento Florentine style of the main building. He asked Don Alvaro to go ahead with arranging the purchase. As they had no money, their only possible method was to buy the property by making a symbolic down payment. Then they would get a mortgage on it and use it to pay off the Count.
Don Alvaro, Salvador Canals and a lawyer friend, Dr. Merlini, negotiated with the owner and came to an agreement. They achieved such a reduction on the initial price that it almost seemed a gift. Two or three years later the property would be worth thirty or forty times as much. But the fact was that even though it was a small amount, at the time they did not have the money. They resorted to asking everyone they knew for help. They managed to persuade the owner of the villa to formalise the sale without any money, giving him as a pledge a few gold coins which they had been keeping to make a sacred vessel with. As they did not want to lose these, they stipulated in the contract that the gold coins should be returned when they paid the total amount. They committed themselves to finalising the deal within two months. Gori Mazzoleni’s only condition was for payment to be made in Swiss francs. He was content to wait until the buyers got the money together. When the contract was finally signed, in the early hours of the morning, Don Alvaro and Salvador Canals returned to the apartment in Città Leonina to find Father Escriva waiting for them, not just awake but on his knees, praying in the oratory.
“He accepted the gold coins – and he’s giving us two months!” they said. “His only condition is that the payment must be made in Swiss francs.”
Father Escriva started to laugh and shrugged his shoulders, surprised and amused. “We don’t care! We have neither lira nor francs, and one currency is the same as another for Our Lord.” Later on, asking his daughters to pray for this matter, he said with a mischievous wink, “Mind you get the currency right: it has to be in Swiss francs.”
Payment had not yet been made when Count Gori Mazzoleni met Encarnita Ortega and Concha Andres one day on the streets of Rome. He stopped his car and gave them a lift to Città Leonina. On the way he praised Don Alvaro to the skies: “To me, he’s not just an honest person with whom I’ve made a deal; he’s a loyal friend, a wise counsellor, and an admirable priest.”
Some time later, when the people of the Work had moved to the villa on Bruno Buozzi Street and were living in the lodge, the Count went to visit them. He was taken into what had been his house, and seeing the gloss on the floor, he asked Salvador Canals, “Have you changed the floor?”
“No, it’s the same one, but clean.”
The Count might have said the same some time later, if he had visited the main house: some of the walls had been washed, others had been covered in cloth, though not where big pictures were going to be hung, so as to save material. The people of the Work themselves did most of the decorating, painting ceilings, beams and door frames. They were the same rooms but they had been thoroughly cleaned and artistically painted.
“Where shall I sleep tonight?”
From July 1947 until February 1949 when the Hungarian “tenants” eventually left the villa, the people of the Work lived on the two floors of the lodge. Upstairs were the kitchen, laundry and dining room; downstairs, the Residence, “Il Pensionato”.
There were few rooms and many people living there. Every square metre was used intensively in many ways. At times they had the impression of being on a bus in the rush hour. There was only one bed which had legs and a mattress; at night, people unrolled bed-rolls, as if they were camping. Later on Father Escriva would recall this strange, cramped way of living without dramatizing the situation, and even humorously: “As we had no money, we did not turn on the heating. Neither did we have a place to sleep. We didn’t know where we would sleep at night – inside the hall-door, in one corner or another. There was just one bed and we reserved it for anyone who was ill. Like St Alexis, we lived under the stairs.”
During the day, everyone helped with the building and decorating; they also studied, went to classes at the Pontifical universities and carried out an intense apostolate with their university classmates. Soon Opus Dei spread to several Italian cities: Turin, Bari, Genoa, Milan, Naples and Palermo.
The Opus Dei “banker”
In addition to the difficulties of paying for the property and food for those living there, there was the expense of the building alterations in progress. For the next few years they lived amidst diggers, scaffolding and pickaxes, as well as the comings and goings of foremen, bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers and so on. All these workmen had to be paid every Saturday, no matter what, at one-fifteen p.m.
Don Alvaro bore the brunt of this. He obtained credit, signed bills of exchange, and borrowed money. He himself told a little – not everything – of the difficulties they faced in order to pay for the building materials and give the workers a fair weekly wage: “The first time we managed to pay them without any problems as we had saved up a bit of money, but by the second time, we couldn’t. So we began to search all over Rome for people who would lend us the money we needed. One person did offer to help, but the next day he came back to say he would have to mortgage his property, which was a step out of all proportion to the amount we were asking for. So we had lost a day. Saturday was looming, and the workers had to be paid come what may.
“In the end we spoke to a lawyer called Merlini, a man with a beard which really suited him, a good, devout Catholic and a competent jurist. He had helped us to buy the house, and in many other negotiations. ‘This time,’ he said, ‘it so happens that I have some money left with me by a client, which he has given me the use of for a year.’ He lent it to us at no interest, and it was enough for two weeks’ wages. Then Our Lord saw to it that we should manage with bills of exchange and a certain amount of juggling. It was a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul: a kind of madness, and a source of great stress. How did we manage? It was a miracle. I don’t know how, but we always paid.”
In the end they found a construction company belonging to Leonardo Castelli. He studied the work already under way, as well as the plans of the projected buildings. He could see it was not just a makeshift job, but something that had to be done thoroughly, a project which was to last for centuries. He trusted Don Alvaro’s goodness and honesty. He decided to take over the contract; from then on Castelli would pay the workers’ wages every week. He even increased the number of workmen to speed up the job. Don Alvaro had to meet Castelli’s bill at the end of every two or three months. The debt was no less, but they had more time to find the money.
However, no-one slackened their efforts; in fact they all tightened their belts. They got up at the crack of dawn because they had to walk to the universities, to save the trolley-bus or tram fares. On these long walks they wore rope-soled sandals and carried their shoes in a bag so as not to wear their shoes out.
The building work on the house in Bruno Buozzi Street increased. They were still living in the lodge which they called Il Pensionato, “the boarding-house”.
As he was not suffering from a craze for building, and also because he was keener on finishing things than beginning them, Father Escrivá always refused to bless foundation stones. In the case of the building on Bruno Buozzi Street, he held a simple ceremony to bless the last stone of the group of buildings that made up Villa Tevere. It consisted of the sign of the Cross and the recital of a Te Deum, followed by a cheerful “Auguri, everybody! siamo arrivati! – we’re here!” It was 9th January 1960, and pouring with rain.
What was Villa Tevere? It was the house of a paterfamilias, the father of a big, hard-working, poor family. It was a fine, large house, simple and unpretentious in style.
What had been a large garden was now built over. More storeys had been added, and several floors below ground level. The complex was neat and well-balanced, by no means monumental or imposing. The classic Florentine style of the original “old house”, Villa Vecchia, had been maintained. The different levels meant that there were lots of staircases, short bridges and connecting corridors.
Literary invention came to the fore in choosing a name for every corner, every bend in the corridor, every little interior patio. Thus the cortili, tiny inner courtyards, took their attractive-sounding names from little ornamental details in them: del Fiume, della Palla, dei Cantori, delle Tartarughe, del Cipresso – the courtyards of the river, the ball, the singers, the tortoises, and the cypress, respectively. A photographer would find it hard to encompass any given aspect in all its details without a special lens. Everything there was as varied as it was compact. You could pass by what they called the Fontana della Navicella or delle Cannelle - the “fountain of the small ship” or “of the springs”, without even realising they were there.
But for those who lived in Villa Tevere, each place had its intimate history. Every stone was an open book, reflecting memories of a time spent close to Father Escriva. “This is where the Father told me ...” “How often the Father, standing in front of this image of Our Lady, would ...” “When we painted the fresco on that wall, the Father helped ...” They were the background to his life, and all of them inseparably linked to the epic of the Work itself: a marble slab; bare footprints, showing the start of a route; the Guardian Angel of Opus Dei; the cheerful inscription with the words “Omnia in bonum” telling the onlooker that “everything is for the best”.
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