FESTA VENEZIANA A CA'TOGA
The imaginative World of a Venetian Artist in Napa Valley

In the serene Northern California town of Calistoga, a splendid villa is fronted by astately wrought-iron gates and a small sign reading "Carlo Marchiori, Maestro d'Arte." Ca'toga, as the Palladian-style villa is named, is the home and workshop of Carlo Marchiori, a world-renowned Venice-born artist. In FESTA VENEZIANA A CA'TOGA, Marchiori serves as tour guide, leading us room by room through this live portfolio, providing deeply personal and mysterious explanations for the wonders that abound in his gallery-like residence. Sixteenth century-style frescoes hang in the main salon, hand-painted stone floors accent the library, and antler and bone sculptures embillish the Native American room. Roman ruins, Thai temples, a seashell-encrusted grotto, and an open-air theater sit in archaic splendor on this dreamscape-turned-landscape. A spontaneous and creative expression of his life and work, Ca'toga is Marchiori's artistic utopia–a work in progress that is a brilliant spectacle to behold.

• Featuring a fantastic repertoire of ceiling murals, wall decorations, folding screens, painted furniture, cenramics, cast stone garden ornaments, and myriad objects d'art inspired by Greco-Pompeiian mythology, Baroque theater, Venetian carnival, and commedia dell'arte themes.
  
  
• Marchiori offers tours of Ca'toga on Saturday mornings from May to October. Tour tickets and art can be purchased at the Ca'toga Galleria D'Arte, located in Calistoga, California.

"Marchiori offers up an instant classical education in his villa and garden. Passers-by can glimpse the richly colored villa across a vineyard. The fake architectural ruins surrounding it–columns, statues, and temples built out of construction-site castoffs; broken concrete sidewalks from town; scraps of wood and flea market finds–were fashioned primarily for the pleasure of creation...The effect is sumptuous and joyful."

– The New York Times

"You are a genuis, Carlo. You give so much excitement and enchantment to the world, taking us out of daily drabness into the territory of imagination.

– Margrit and Robert Mondavi