Parco Palladiano I: Magnolia Bottega Veneta 2016

The old stately house has long been abandoned and overgrown with woody underbrush. The once bright, friendly facade is peeling, and the windowless frames stare blindly into the void.

A warm, sultry night has settled over the swamp land. The Milky Way stretches its silver sparkling band across the velvet black firmament. The loud concert of frogs and cicadas fills the darkness, occasionally interrupted by the call of an owl on the hunt. From time to time, a soft gurgling can be heard as one of the alligators glides into the moonlit dark water. The archaic lizards have returned, as soon as the estate lay still and lifeless once again.

Muffled voices drift over from the wide river, barges making their way south, and sometimes a historic and illusion-restored paddle steamer, laden with tourists on a sentimental quest for relics of a long-gone glorious era.

From the river, the once-proud mansion is no longer visible. Shrubs and vines have woven a cocoon around the terrain over countless years of abandonment, in which it now lies hidden in deep slumber, resigned to its fate covered in cobwebs. The passage of time has brought relentless changes, as it always does. Everything has long since become different. Everything except for one thing.

The magnolias are still there, and they have always exuded their sweet, heavy scent. They remain untouched by rotting wood and moldy facades. They alone are witnesses to rise and fall, pride and damnation, submission and liberation. They still belong to the house; nothing and no one has been able to drive them away so far.

They would have stories to tell of masters and slaves, of wealth and misery, of raucous parties and bitter tragedies, of love and suffering, of happiness as well as pain, blood and tears. Here, there was dancing and beating, loving and fighting, laughing and betraying, murdering and marrying, being born and being buried.

Time, the great equalizer, has spared no one. Sooner or later, the swamp will reclaim the land wrested from it generations ago, along with the once fertile plantations. Already, the old secluded cemetery and with it the graves of the former inhabitants have sunk into its mire.

Only the magnolias still bloom and defy the all-consuming underbrush. They unflinchingly spread their scent, heavy, sweet, intoxicating, and enchanting the senses. But perhaps their time will also pass in the swamp someday.

The great river cares little for this. From the distant shore of the Mississippi, a soft song drifts over:

“Ol' Man River, that Ol' Man River
He must know somethin', but he don't say nothin'
He just keeps rollin', he keeps on rollin' along.

He don't plant taters, and he don't plant cotton
And them what plants 'em is soon forgotten
But Ol' Man River, he just keeps rollin' along.”

On its way to the sea, it carries a hint of magnolia scent with it.