Ligabue Magazine 78
First semester 2021
Year XL
All aboard for a journey that in this occasion is limited in space but wide in time. This number of the Magazine is all dedicated to Venice 1600, that is, the one-thousand six-hundred years from the mythical foundation date of the city, the 21 March 421.
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We start with a voyage into “Wonders”, guided by me, Alberto Angela, with my authors Aldo Piro, Filippo Arriva, Fabio Buttarelli, Ilaria Degano, Vito Lamberti, Paolo Logli, Emilio Quinto. We start from above, a walk on the roof of the basilica di San Marco, among the cupole, and then continue along the rest of the piazza (the only one in Venice, all the others are called campi, campielli or corti). The bell tower, the torre dell’Orologio, the courtyard of Palazzo ducale, with the Scala dei giganti and the prisons, with a reference to the most famous prisoner kept in the cells under the roof, called “piombi”, that is, the XVIII century adventurer Giacomo Casanova.
We have a voyage from the origins, with Diego Calaon that explains Torcello, the lagoon island that is the ancestor of the Rivo Alto islands, those that today we know as Venice. Calaon, archaeologist and teacher of ancient topography at the Università di Ca’ Foscari, is the director at the Torcello excavations that have recently discovered Carolingian frescos within the basilica of Santa Maria Assunta. This discovery has influenced the discussion of Venice’s origins: was Venice born Byzantine, as generally accepted by historians, or Carolingian, as the recently discovered frescos could infer?
Renaissance Venice was also the capital of collecting. Toto Bergamo Rossi recounts the most important coffer that held these treasures, palazzo Grimani at Santa Maria Formosa.
The Grimani who collected were Antonio, who was elected Doge in 1521, and his son Domenico, who became a cardinal in 1493. The Venetian family had a “vigna” in Rome, and, when they started building a villa there, many Roman statues were discovered that formed the nucleus of the
collection. The Venetian palace was built on a Roman and not a Venetian plan, becoming a unique architectural example, and within it a “Camerino delle antichità” was built, where the original statues have been put back as they were originally in the beginning of the XVI century.
Venice’s appearance changed in the first half of the XVI century, Donatella Calabi, city historian, tells us how. New buildings are built or old remodeled. Usually it was fires that made these constructions necessary: fires followed one another with devastating effect in a city that was mostly made of wood. In 1505 the Fondaco dei tedeschi on Rialto burns down, and was rebuilt in only three years, in 1512 there is a fire in the Procuratie vecchie in Piazza San Marco and flames damage the Palazzo ducale many times, from 1483 to 1577, when a fire destroys much of the building that had to be mostly rebuilt. Venice looked out to the world, and Alberto Toso Fei introduces us to some of the city’s explorers. No, not Marco Polo, of whom everything has been said, even that he wasn’t Venetian. We have instead Alvise da Mosto, who discovered the Cape Verde islands in 1456 and was the first European to sail up the Gambia river. The Zen brothers, who in 1389 sailed on behalf of the Scottish prince Henry of Sinclair, and, following the Viking routes, probably arrived in America without realizing they docked on a new continent. Another family, this time father and son, John and Sebastian Cabot, that also cross the Atlantic, but know what they are doing and discover land that will become Canada. Finally two Querini, Pietro in the XV century, that after a shipwreck ends on the Lofoten islands and discovers stockfish, called baccalà in Venice, the other, Francesco in the XX century, who died among the North Pole’s ice. Finally, all to the cinema. Michele Gottardi, cinema critic, illustrates the many cities that the seventh art has narrated.
A tracking shot – the right word to use since this technique was made in Venice – on the films set in Venice, from the origins to the most recent, with 007 and the palazzo reduced to ruins.
The many films have been organised by genre, from mystery to melodrama, from death to adventure, to Shakespeare and paper-mache Venices built in studios.
All aboard then, ready to admire Venice’s wonders.

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