hellovenezia

The first woman graduate in the world, fishes that can count, the island of San Giorgio, a cultural and social centre, but also a place of mysteries and fantastic stories. The bar where spritz was invented and Titian’s last painting, which was done for his tomb and which the Master did not succeed in finishing.

Alma Mater Studiorum, the University of Bologna, is thought to be the oldest university existing today in the western world and one of the most illustrious. Its year of foundation has been established as being 1088, and a board of historians chaired by poet Giosuè Carducci, formed on its eight hundredth anniversary, identified the founder as Irnerio, a jurist. It was the turn of Padua University about 150 years later, but few persons may know that it took another 550 years to find the first woman graduate, and this honour was awarded, in fact, to a Venetian woman. Elena Lucrezia Cornaro was born in 1646 of an ancient and noble Venetian family that had given the city four Doges, nine Cardinals and, by no means the least important, the renowned Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus.
Elena showed that she was gifted with great intelligence and sensibility from the time of her infancy and her father, a Venetian magistrate, gave her the best tutors available. Apart from Greek and Latin, she studied natural sciences, geography, astronomy, mathematics and languages, including Hebrew, Spanish, French and Arabic. She studied to satisfy her thirst for knowledge, but in order to comply with her father’s wishes she agreed to be presented at Padua University to graduate in Theology. This plan was opposed by eminent prelates, who did not consider a qualification of this kind suitable for a woman, but she was allowed to sit for a degree in Philosophy as an alternative.
The discussion of her thesis was set for nine in the morning on 25 June 1678. The hall of the Sacred College was packed and many foreigners from different parts of Europe came to attend this exceptional event. The defence of her thesis was so successful that the usual secret ballot was overlooked and the new graduate was acclaimed.

Elena Lucrezia Cornato Piscopia is commemorated in Venice by a small plaque attached to the side of the palace in which she was born, Cà Farsetti, in Calle del Carbon. Cà Farsetti, with Cà Loredan, are the present headquarters of the Venice City Council. Both buildings are thirteenth century, altered in the sixteenth century (Rialto Actv stop, services 1 and 82).
After beginning our journey on this social and cultural note, we will go on with other intellectual curiosities, some more whimsical and trivial, but not the less interesting in spite of this. In fact on our second leg we will find a natural habitat that holds a scientific curiosity that has only just been made public. From Rialto we go to San Zaccaria (services 1 or 82, or walk down Mercerie and across St. Mark’s Square) and from here we take a waterbus to the island of San Giorgio against the splendid backdrop of St. Mark’s Basin. When we get off, we observe the water near the big posts to which the landing stage is attached with massive iron chains, and we shall see numbers of small fish crowding together as they swim against the stream, and among them the Gambusia Holbrooki. These small fish about five centimetres long imported from America with the special characteristic of preying on mosquito larvae would not arouse any particular attention had very recent studies conducted by Padua University not revealed that these little swimmers can count, and up to four!

So if you thought that it was a characteristic of fish to be dumb, you were wrong, at least as far as the Gambusia Holbrooki are concerned: as it happens, these counting fish swim in the city where Luca Pacioli’s double entry system of accounting was invented, as seen in his book entitled Summa de arithmetica, geometrica, proportioni et proportionalita.
But when we look up and around us, we have the chance to see one of Venice’s breathtaking panoramas. We are in the forecourt of the Church of San Giorgio, the work of Vicenza architect Andrea Palladio, who started working on its design in 1565. The church was completed in 1576, although its façade was only finished by Vincenzo Scamozzi in 1610, thirty years after the master’s death.
It is dedicated to Saints George and Stephen (the remains are kept in the basilica) and is built in the form of a Latin cross with three naves, a central dome and a big presbytery. In the naves are sepulchral monuments of Doges and other important dignitaries. Standing out among the paintings are the Last Supper andFall of the Manna by Jacopo Tintoretto, canvases by Domenico Tintoretto, Jacopo Bassano, Palma the Younger and Sebastiano Ricci. There is a painting of St. George Killing the Dragon in the upper chapel.
From the church we can go up the bell tower, rebuilt in 1791 after the collapse of a much older one (1467) in 1774, for another breathtaking view, or wander to the famous Teatro Verde, 1952, architects Luigi Vietti and Angelo Scattolin, if the garden, the largest privately owned park in the city, is open to the public.
Beside the church is the former Benedictine abbey, the home of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, with a series of highly interesting architectural sights: the Cypress Cloister, the Palladian Cloister, the Palladian Cenacle, Longhena’s Grand Staircase and Library, Manica Lunga (the former monks’ dormitory) and the Tapestry Hall.
These spaces and places were the home and laboratory of Pellegrino Alfredo Maria Ernetti, known to most as simply Father Ernetti, who was born at Rocca Santo Stefano in the Province of Rome in 1925 and died on the island in 1994. Father Ernetti was a very special personage in various fields, including musicology, inventions and exorcism. He was famous above all for having done research in a rather unconventional sector as far as the scientific community is concerned and one that is nearer the world of science fiction.

Starting from a working assumption conceived in the nineteen forties with Father Agostino Gemelli, a Franciscan, a doctor and the founder of the Milan Università Cattolica, he is said to have designed and made the Chronovisor towards the end of the nineteen fifties with a group of famous scientists including the Italian Enrico Fermi and the German Wernher von Braun: this machine enables people to view past events. Literally a time machine.
The scientific theories at the basis of this instrument enabled the past to come to life again; it took Father Ernetti back to times that were very important and often decisive for the human race, such as the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ. Nobody knows what has become of the Chronovisor, spirited away by the Vatican it seems, together with Father Ernetti’s travel notes and photographs. They all remain a fascinating mystery, or, on the contrary, a magnificent jest conceived by scientists enjoying their leisure moments.
To recover from all these amazing things, we will savour a break and a good drink, which we can do in one of the most famous bars in the world, Harry’s Bar in Calle Vallaresso, near St. Mark’s, only five minutes’ walk from San Zaccaria. “Welles, Hemingway, Bogart, Bacall, Coward, Toscanini, the Windsors, the Burtons: they were all regular customers of Harry's Bar in Venice. And it’s still a pleasure not to be given up.” The words of the proprietor, Arrigo Cipriani.

Apparently the popularity of Spritz, like that of the pigeons, is due to the soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that occupied Venice in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is supposed to have been invented in Harry’s Bar or some other Venetian establishment. The origin of the name is said to be the German verb spritzen, meaning to spray, indicating the action of diluting Veneto wine, which is strong and rather alcoholic, with water. In subsequent years the custom spread to other towns with the gradual introduction of variations that, as a touch of colour, envisaged the addition of red liquor, with the consequent unfortunate disappearance of ladybirds, which are the basic element of this red.
The last appointment of this day in Venice, perhaps a memorable one, is with the last picture Tiziano Vecellio painted before he died. It hangs in the Accademia Galleries (Actv services 1 and 2) and is called La Pietà, or Lamentation over the Dead Christ. It is in oils on a large canvas (389 x 351 cm), executed by Titian between 1575 and 1576, with some parts completed by Palma the Younger.

This is a picture painted to ornament the tomb of the master himself, who was now very old and intent on his last work in a studio/workshop abandoned by all because the plague was raging in Venice - his son Orazio, his beloved second child, fell ill with it too.
Uneven, shadowy, highly charged, painted not only with the brush but by spreading out colour directly on the canvas with the fingers, a pitiless self-portrait of a ninety-year-old man in the figure of Nicodemus, who finds his eternal equilibrium supporting the dead Christ’s body but at the same time hanging on to it, in a continuous fluctuation, even an iconographic fluctuation, between death and resurrection. A masterpiece that almost miraculously precedes Expressionism and Impressionism by three centuries.
Tintoretto died on 27 August 1576 among the spasms of the plague and only a special order, issued urgently, saved his body from the common grave: he was buried the next day in the Church of Santa Maria dei Frari in a hurried ceremony and his unfinished painting was not put on his tomb to adorn it. His home in Biri Grande was sacked and his only remaining son, Pomponio, squandered all his father’s goods in a very brief space of time. Moreover, as a last outrage or mystery, a nineteenth century exploration found no remains of the master in the Frari Church.
Nevertheless, Titian’s works and his fame remain, both immortal.
1 and 82 waterbus services in all directions from Accademia.

 Alessandro Rizzardini (riproduzione riservata ©)