hellovenezia

A tour that intends to find four gems among the many Venetian treasures.

Giacomo Casanova’s letters at the Querini Stampalia Library, the Circolo La Gondola photographic archive at Palazzo Fortuny, the stuccos of Palazzo Albrizzi at San Polo and Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man at the Accademia Galleries.

What we are going to suggest now is an itinerary that will attempt to show things that most people know of, but that it is difficult to see, in practice, if not completely impossible. So the degree of interest and the personal skill requested of our travellers will perhaps be double the usual amount: in fact it is a real challenge.

We start our journey at the Querini Stampalia Foundation Library in Campo Santa Maria Formosa. This foundation was created with the legacy of the last of the descendants of the Querini house, Conte Giovanni (1799-1869), who also laid down some conditions in his testament that are fundamental to the management of this entity, whose purpose is to promote “devotion to good studies and useful disciplines”. Another condition of the legacy is that the library should be open every day of the week and also in the evening, when the other public libraries are closed. These may be obvious conditions, but we must consider that they were revolutionary for the age.

Count Giovanni was the last of the Stampalia branch of the Querini house: the name comes from the Greek island that his ancestors administered on behalf of the Venetian Republic from 1517 onwards. The history of the Querini family is closely interwoven with that of Venice and involves the house in more than one sinister deed

Let us return to the Foundation, which was based on the Querini family’s book collection. Books were a family passion that came into being as early as the year 1400 with Lauro Querini, a humanist, philosopher and reader of Aristoteles; it continued with Cardinal Angelo Maria Querini (1680-1755) and Andrea Querini (1710-1795), Giovanni’s father and the last Venetian ambassador to Paris.

There are very rare manuscripts, incunabula and other wonders at the Querini Stampalia (including a magnificent picture gallery) and among the items that can be consulted are some letters from Giacomo Casanova, collected by Count Giovanni himself.

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, who was born in Venice on 2 April 1725 and died at Dux, now Duchcov, on 4 June 1798, was an adventurer, writer, diplomat and Venetian secret agent, as we read in the introduction to his entry in Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopaedia. But Casanova was even more than that: freemason, practitioner of esoteric rites, swashbuckler, merchant, poet, theologian, textile manufacturer, lottery manager, mathematician, historiographer, legendary lover and we don’t know how many other things he could do. Were it not for the transitional nature of everything in this world, the sensation of touching our man’s letters with our hands, letters written in a flowing hand in blue ink, would be really profound and overpowering.

(Warning: access to the library is subject to special regulations. The possibility of reading Casanova’s letters is not one that is open to all those who apply to do so.)

From Giacomo Casanova our tour takes us to discover the interior of a Venetian palace. Starting from the Querini Stampalia Foundation, we cross Campo Santa Maria Formosa and walk to Rialto, where we take a No. 1 waterbus and get off at San Silvestro. From there, along a route through a minor, less known Venice (Sant’Aponal, Ponte Storto, Carampane) we finally reach Campiello Albrizzi, where the palace of the name stands. The exterior architecture of this building is unpretentious, perhaps owing to the law of opposites, because the interior is one of the most spectacular sights one could find, and not only in Venice.

The history of the building is that of the family that gives it its name. The Albrizzi, merchants from Bergamo, settled in Venice in the 16th century. They bought the entire palace in 1692 and embellished and enriched it as the years passed. At the end of the 18th century leading personalities in letters and arts conversed in the rooms of Palazzo Albrizzi, adorned with amazing stuccos of fluttering putti, the work of the Ticino sculptor, Abbondio Stazio. We can imagine, all caught at one stroke in one of the rooms, Alfieri, Pindemonte and Canova (who wrought a marble bust for the lady of the house, Isabella Teotochi, still to be found at Palazzo Albrizzi), chattering amiably to each other among flights of angels and cherubs zooming about on the ceilings.

(Note: Palazzo Albrizzi is a private residence and access to the rooms must be arranged with the owners.)

We move from Palazzo Albrizzi to the third place to visit on our little trip. We turn back to the San Silvestro waterbus stop and take the No. 1 in the direction of Lido; we get off at Sant’Angelo, bound for Palazzo Fortuny, whose name comes from Mariano Fortuny, an Italianised version of Maria Fortuny i de Madrazo, an eclectic interested in photography, stage set design, stagecraft, the creation of fabrics and painting. He bought the palace, an old Gothic building that originally belonged to the Pesaro family, for his home and his studio. After his death, in 1956 his wife Henriette donated the building to the City Council, which still preserves Mariano Fortuny’s fabrics and collections, allowing access to the museum devoted to him. The local authority has made it a place that is a symbol of modern visual communication disciplines and the venue for important travelling exhibitions.

And yet Palazzo Fortuny is also home to a small, perhaps little known gem: on the third floor, in three small adjacent rooms, is the historical archive of the La Gondola Photographic Club. Founded in 1948, this club, still fully active, has seen a succession of photographer-members that have contributed to the glory of Italian photography, such as Paolo Monti, Gino Bolognini, Luciano Scattola and Alfredo Bresciani (the four founder members) followed by Giovanni Berengo Gardin, Bepi Bruno, Elio Ciol, Bruno Rosso, Toni Dal Tin, Carlo Nason, Fulvio Roiter and many others until our own times. The collection is an amazing set of more than 13,000 autographed vintage works in a digital catalogue, telling the story of the evolution of Venetian and Italian society.

(Warning: the archive is visited by arrangement with the Club management.)

Our lungs exhausted by the long flights of stairs to the third floor of Palazzo Fortuny, now we have the most difficult trial of our journey. From Sant’Angelo we take the No. 1 again, this time to the Accademia waterbus stop.

Our target is a single work preserved in the Accademia Galleries, which has been taken as a symbol of the entire human race. What we are talking about is the renowned drawing of Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci. This is a drawing by Leonardo of 1490, preserved with extraordinary care and all possible attention in the Galleries’ Drawings and Prints Cabinet. It is man at the centre of everything, the search for a perfect mathematical formula in the construction of the human body inscribed in a series of geometric figures. Philosophy, the sciences and art all concentrated in a single extraordinary drawing, whose reproduction travels on a rocket sent into space looking for contact with an alien race, like one of the symbols of Earth’s civilisation.

Or also the image that accompanies us in our everyday life, reproduced on the euro coin, chosen as a symbol of Italy.

See the original of Vitruvian Man? Impossible mission, but, as the saying goes, never say die: the opportunity may be just round the corner.

Alessandro Rizzardini (riproduzione riservata ©)