hellovenezia

Three Venice examples whose beginnings are lost in the mists of the past and and that look into the future.

The Contraternity of the Misericordia, from church to barracks and from barracks to gymnasium and sports centre, known as the frescoed gymnasium. The waterbus home on Giudecca.

The Stucky Mill, also on Giudecca, from sacks of flour to the suites of one of the most luxurious and exclusive hotels in Venice.

Ingvar Kamprand, a man of over eighty, lives at Epalinges, in Switzerland. Nothing odd up to now. His house is a small villa, not too luxuriously furnished, and Mr Kamprand himself assembled many of the pieces. Nothing strange here either. Mr Kamprand does not think there is any harm in comparing prices on market stalls and choosing the best bargains, and that it is better to be thought mean than throw money out of the window. Words of wisdom.
It does strike us as strange, however, if we find out the real identity of our man, and the size of his personal fortune, estimated at 18 billion euro - the seventh wealthiest person in the world. Mr Kamprand is the person that conceived, founded and owns Ikea.
What has Venice to do with this? It’s quickly explained: perhaps re-utilisation, recycling, economising on materials and places has never occurred on such a formidable scale, or ever taken place so continuously over the centuries, anywhere else in the world.
For example the monastery, church and bell tower of the island of Sant’Ariano near Burano were knocked down because the environment was unhealthy, owing to the presence of carbonazzi, snakes that were not poisonous but bit and flailed about with their tails aggressively and because of the fall in religious vocations: the brick and marble were re-used to build the Church of the Redeemer on Giudecca in fulfilment of the vow made for the end of the 1576 plague.
And this is not all: wars, sacking and pillage enriched the city with thousands of prizes, to the point that a lot of worked marble and entire sculptures were used to adorn the fronts of houses that were not even very important architecturally, almost for purely hedonistic pleasure.
As we have already said, the recycling of materials and the environment has been a continuous process, one of the main aspects being that buildings conceived for religious functions have then been re-used for less obvious purposes, either because of their size or owing to certain social circumstances,
This is what happened to the Scuola Grande del Valverde, or della Misericordia, in the Cannaregio district near Cà d’Oro or the Church of Madonna dell’Orto (Actv service 1 to Cà d’Oro or services 42-42 or 51-52 to Orto if we prefer to take a waterbus round the outside of the city).

In Venice, the term scuola is an ancient institution in the nature of a guild, corporation and confraternity, and also indicates the building in which its headquarters was located. There are two confraternities of Santa Maria del Valverde, situated beside each other, the Vecchia (old) and Nuova (new), the latter also known as the Scuola della Misericordia. There was a record of the old confraternity in 1308, and it is known to have been enlarged later with the construction of a church (which now has a rich Baroque façade) and a hospital.
After this, when the number of members further increased, Jacopo Tati, known as Sansovino, who had just come to Venice as a refugee from the sack of Rome in 1527, was appointed to design and construct another building with the specification that, “… it must overshadow any other building in Venice for beauty and size”. The dimensions achieved were in fact grandiose: the confraternity meeting hall on the first floor, measuring 21 metres by 49, is only second in vastness to the Greater Council Hall in the Doges’ Palace. Work started in 1534 and it took fifty years to complete the structure. Sansovino had died in the meantime, in November 1570. An interesting point is that the more revolutionary aspects of Sansovino’s design were lost, such as the vaulted reversed elliptical stone roof. This feature was lost because in spite of the Venice building boom, events in this period often saw the city affected by wars, pestilences and other happenings that reduced the numbers of clients and their financial resources. In any event, the building was delivered, as is still clearly seen now, with its exterior unfinished.
Perhaps an effort of the imagination is needed to try and imagine a building abounding in marbles and statues like the contemporary Venetian scuole of San Rocco and San Giovanni Evangelista and realise the full splendour of the original design.
The confraternity was closed in 1806. As first Austrians and then French forces occupied the city in succession, it was quickly converted into army offices, local authority offices and a recruiting office. In 1921 the Venice City Council granted the Constantino Reyer Sports Club a concession to manage it. The club used it as a base for its gymnastics activities; in 1927 the concession was revoked and only renewed a few years later.

After this there were various alterations involving both sanitation and structure until it became a true sports centre (on the first floor with twelve massive columns and imposing supporting beams) exclusively used by Reyer and its basketball team in particular, which won two Italian championships in 1942 and 1943. The legend of the frescoed gymnasium was born here: the works are those designed by Sansovino and executed by Alvise del Friso; these frescos that look down from the walls over a very fine herringbone pattern parquet floor like that of the fabled American Boston Celtics have seen generations of outstanding players. The legend is associated with that of the “Misericordia scream”, the din generated by the thousand spectators that scrambled hazardously up to the great windows to see the matches and urge on their favourites, a scream that spread throughout the city like the crash of a big wave.
The Misericordia, or Reyer as the confraternity building is usually called, was closed to preserve its art works at the end of the nineteen-seventies and only now has a reutilisation project for commercial, museum and exhibition purposes (the 2009 Art Bienniale) been able to bring it back to life in a new and perhaps unexpected form.
From Misericordia we now go to the island of Giudecca, which brings to mind the period of the derbies in the first division of the basketball championship in 1955 and 1956 (the Giudecca team was Junghans, composed of workers from the factory of the same name that played on an open-air concrete ground). Not only this, but we are curious to see how an old waterbus can be re-used and made a proper home.
We have to get off at Palanca (services 2 or 41-42) and go on along the quayside towards Ponte Longo, then walk along a long, windy lane to the right that takes us to a stone bridge. After this, in a space behind the Judecca Nova houses, tied up to massive oak posts is the waterbus dwelling of a Danish family, the K*****. The craft is an old Series 20 VA, launched in 1935 that continued to sail with the public transport company until the end of the nineteen-eighties. When two of these vessels were de-registered, they were bought by the K*****s. This Venetian waterbus home has its own street number, Giudecca 399A (the number was allocated on 12 March 2005), while the other, the former Alvise Foscari, a proper summer residence, sails placidly along the canals of France.
There are four recycled waterbuses: we have seen two of them and there is a third, also on Giudecca being rebuilt and a fourth, former outer lagoon waterbus 39 that started to serve in 1919 along the Brenta Canal, used as a studio of architecture.
The last example of the art of reutilisation on the way back from our Venetian pilgrimage is the conversion of the former Molino Stucky.

To get there, we have an attractive ten-minute stroll along the Giudecca Canal with the opportunity of looking at the magnificent view, then pass by the very old Church of Sant’Eufemia, the Church and cloister of Santi Cosma e Damiano (here too the buildings have been reutilised on a wide scale for residential and commercial purposes), the women’s prison and the former headquarters of Scalera Film, the Venetian filming studios during the time of the puppet Italian Social Republic, ruined but now being restored, until we come below Molino Stucky.
The Stucky Mill is one of the most important examples of Neo-Gothic architecture applied to an industrial building. It rises at the western end of the island beside another old factory, the one that produced Mariano Fortuny’s artistic fabrics. The mill was built in 1895 at the initiative of a Swiss businessmen, Giovanni Stucky, who commissioned the German architect Ernst Wullekopf to design it. When it was working at full rhythm, it employed up to 1,500 workers; a serious crisis, the obsolescence of the equipment and the difficulties afflicting the concept of industry in Venice led to its closure in 1955. Its derelict condition, its battlements and the Neo-Gothic features of its skyline turned it into a legend in the years that followed.
Then came a slow restoration on the part of a construction company, Acqua Pia Antica Marcia, brusquely interrupted by a spectacular, terrifying fire on 15 April 2003. Now, with the restoration complete, one wing of the former mill is used for residences and the rest is a sumptuous conference centre and a Hilton belonging to the international hotel chain.
From here, take services 2 and 41-42 from Sacca Fisola towards all the main destinations.

Alessandro Rizzardini (riproduzione riservata ©)