VIZCAYA

The cultural highlight of our Miami Tour-a-Thon yesterday was a couple of hours at Vizcaya. You can make it mean "place to see the islands" but it's really an amalgam of names and languages to add to the pretense of the place. James Deering built the place in 1914-1916 in what was then farmland south of Miami proper. He had made a fortune in farm equipment such as tractors and plows (International Harvester, maybe you've heard of it?). But he had ambitions to be seen as a cultured international harvester of antiquities and especially Italian style and design, which was the ultra of the day.

So he had a Master Designer create a mansion, gardens, boat landing, tea house, fountains, statues, etc. on 150 acres and shoreline. All in ornate furnishings that were brought over at great expense. Or exact detail replicas and honorifics. (No pictures allowed inside --- I snuck just one.)Hard to describe the over-the-top feeling you get now, but if this estate hadn't been lovingly created and then preserved ---- you wouldn't be able to muse about the first electric dumb waiter or the private balcony (private except for the secret connected guest room!). Or the sense of being at a gondola stop in Venice with its barber-shop painted poles.Or the swimming pool reached by private baroque elevator from Mr. Deering's study. Did he ever skinny dip??

Words can't do justice. From tractor sales to wanna-be Italian.