CHAPTER 23
"Elegance, extravagance, and entertainment, these three words capture James Deering's vision for Vizcaya." That was Angeline, the perky Haitian woman guiding our tour. She wore sneakers because of all the ground she had to cover. That's how big Vizcaya is.
We were standing in the entrance loggia (a gallery with an open side) near a 17th-century statue of youthful Bacchus wearing grapes on his head and a strategically-placed fig leaf. The floor had four kinds of granite arranged in a 3-D tumbling block design that made me a little dizzy. The marble sarcophagus (early Roman Empire) and Egyptian granite urns near Bacchus told me two things: Vizcaya had (literally) tons of marble and granite and James Deering had gone on a hell of a shopping spree to outfit his summer mansion. Whi
