Category Archives: Venice and Veneto

The playwright Ferenc Molnár, by his grandson

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The latest title in the Blue Danube imprint, which focuses on literature, history and travel in Central Europe, is Venetian Angel, a short novel by Ferenc Molnár, now translated into English for the first time.  Molnár was a famous pre-war dramatist whose many plays included one on which the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel was based.  Here, in the introduction, his grandson Mátyás Sárközi writes about the author:

The putto, the “angel” of the title, is the one on the right, below the Madonna’s left foot in Bellini’s beautiful altarpiece in the sacristy of the Frari in Venice. The saints around her are Nicholas of Bari, Peter, Mark and Benedict (Blue Guide Venice)

Ferenc Molnár, my grandfather, had to leave Hungary in 1937 because of the Fascist tide there. He aimed to take refuge in America, but his first stop on the way to New York was Venice, a city he loved dearly. In this novel he calls it ‘a wonder of the world’.

Daily life in Budapest was still undisturbed in 1933. Molnár was seen daily in his straw hat, sparkling monocle in the right eye, strolling along the Duna Corso, the promenade on the Pest side of the Danube, stretching from the Elisabeth Bridge to the Chain Bridge. Already a well-known dramatist and writer in Europe and America, he was greeted at every step, even by friendly strangers. The Athenaeum publishing house asked him for a new novel. What should he write about? He submitted a manuscript without much of a story, its title inspired by a little flute-blowing putto at the bottom of Bellini’s Madonna in the Frari church in Venice. In essence, the story is a love triangle, a romance coloured with intrigue and jealousy. Molnár, with the skill of a psychologist, describes a young woman on the verge of becoming a grown-up, still unversed in the complications of adult life, still a dreamer. The action is played out against the backdrop of the Venice which Molnár knew so well, with its fascinating history and its narrow little alleyways.

He maintains that living abroad makes one different. Does it? Perhaps less so today than it did in Molnár’s time. Now the world’s populace is becoming a global melting pot of nationalities and races. But the main theme remains eternal. The protagonists come into sharp focus in Molnár’s mirror. A mirror which is able to show not only virtues, but every human foible and frailty.

Mátyás Sárközi
Hampstead, 2024

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Venice attempts to stem the tide

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(and some news from Rome and Florence)

by Alta Macadam

The long-discussed entrance restrictions to Venice are finally to become operational on 25th April. The system is designed to limit the numbers of day-trippers, who come to the city for just a few hours (often as part of a tour group) and from whom the city reaps very little benefit, if any. Overtourism has damaged Venice in many ways and the declared aim is to reduce the crowds, encourage longer visits and improve the quality of life for residents. It is also a way in which visitors can be monitored so that certain days of the year do not become too crowded, and it provides an incentive to visitors to come at the least crowded periods. It is a genuine experiment to regulate the flow. Venice is supposedly the first city in the world to undertake this experiment.

All the (fairly complicated) details are given here.

This is the only official City of Venice tourist information website, even though it rarely comes up as one of your first search results, and the website itself adds to the confusion by not giving any information on the ‘Venice access (entry) fee’ on its opening page (you have to go to the next page).

The first step is to look on the calendar to see which days are subject to the restrictions (these generally include all weekends). On these days, if you are entering the city between 8.30 am and 4pm, you are subject to an entrance fee of 5 euro. (The 4pm limit means people are free to come in to the city in the evening – for instance those who might want to have dinner there or attend a concert).

You are not subject to an entry fee if you are staying overnight or longer somewhere in the historic city (or even within the municipal area, which includes Mestre on the mainland) in any type of accommodation. However, you are now obliged to ‘register’ by filling out a form to get a QR code to show that you are exempt from the entrance fee as the “guest of an accommodation facility”. On the form provided, the names of everyone staying with you, the dates of your stay and the name of the place where you are staying, will all be required. You will need to use the QR code for access and show to any official doing a check while you are in the city.

For a direct link to the forms to fill in, if you are staying in Venice for at least one night), see here.

For the exemption rules (which include children under 14 and the disabled), see here.

It seems there will be one or two offices in Venice, including at the railway station, where you will be able to register and pay but clearly you are much better off to arrive fully armed with your QR code. There is also talk of a number of access points (airport, railway station, car parks, etc.) where you will be required to have your QR code passed.

If, sadly, you can only visit the city for a day, see the website for the procedures, which include payment of an entrance fee.

Many people in Italy and abroad will be eagerly waiting to see how this new system works and if it produces the hoped-for results. For now, the signs are positive and everyone is feeling optimistic.

This long thought-out attempted solution to Venice’s problems seems far distant from the latest campaign to encourage tourism by the flamboyant Minister of Tourism. One wonders if it isn’t going a bit too far to dress up Botticelli’s Venus (a detail from his iconic Birth of Venus) in a T-shirt and show her eating a pizza on Lake Como, or in shorts outside the Colosseum. She is touted as the Minister’s ‘virtual influencer’. The whole campaign is bizarrely titled ‘Open to Meraviglia’.

Rome
A few months ago some very negative news came in from Rome. It is now necessary to purchase a ticket (and therefore join a queue) to enter the Pantheon, the greatest ancient building in the city to have survived virtually intact. This was met with great sadness by many inhabitants and visitors alike as, without an entrance ticket and the paraphernalia that entails, it had always been a place to savour whenever one was in the vicinity: with even just a few minutes to spare, one could stand in one of the most extraordinary spaces ever created. The disappointing decision to impose an entry fee was taken by the Cultural Ministry and the Roman diocese in June 2023.

Florence
One of the most curious recent events in Florence has been the decision of Eike Schmidt to stand for Mayor in the forthcoming local election (to be held in June). After eight years as the much-admired director of the Uffizi, he has put on hold his next appointment to the Capodimonte museum in Naples, become an Italian citizen, and begun his campaign in Florence, running as an independent. He launched his campaign for “Firenze Magnifica” on 17th April.

Alta Macadam is the author of Blue Guides to Venice, Rome and Florence.

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Most rare in marble portraits

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The above title is a quote from Giorgio Vasari. They are the words he used, in his famous Lives of the Artists, to describe Alessandro Vittoria (1525–1608), a man who became one of the greatest Italian sculptors of his age.

Vittoria was born in Trento, a city in the far north of Italy, on the border of the Italian and German-speaking worlds. In the mid-16th century, when Vittoria was a young man, it played host to the famous eccelsiastical council convoked to discuss the threats posed by the growth of Protestantism and to agree a response. A portrait of Vittoria exists from this time, painted by another north Italian, Giovanni Battista Moroni, from Bergamo. Moroni, like many other artists, had gone to Trento, attracted by the opportunities presented by the prominent Council delegates, many of whom wished to have their likenesses taken. In Moroni’s portrait (now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna), Vittoria appears as a confident young man holding a small marble torso. The musculature of this torso is rather peculiar: either Vittoria was very young at the time and not yet very skilled, or else Moroni had never studied anatomy, but nevertheless it serves as an emblem of the kind of sculpture that would make Vittoria famous. He developed a prodigious skill at sculpting portraits in the style of ancient Roman busts, a genre he effectively re-invented and re-popularised, and he became sought-after by numerous patrons. In Vittoria’s native Trento today, there is a square that bears his name with an early 20th-century statue in it showing a middle-aged man holding a sculptor’s chisel, dressed in a frock coat and looking like a dapper Edwardian official from some municipal board of works. He is nothing at all like the confident and self-aware young man that Moroni depicted and which hangs in Vienna. One suspects that the young Vittoria was very confident indeed.

Portrait of Alessandro Vittoria by Giovanni Battista Moroni. Kunsthistorisches Musem, Vienna.

Vittoria was also skilled in plasterwork. When he first went to Venice, he was taken on by the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino, with whom he worked on the steep barrel-vaulted entrance staircase to the Biblioteca Marciana, a space overwhelmingly encrusted with painted stucco. If Vittoria had stuck to this kind of thing, it is unlikely that today we would know his name. The skill is very great, but the overall effect is too much. It is perhaps lucky for posterity that he quarrelled with Sansovino and found a different outlet for his talents. He went on to sculpt bust after bust of well-fed statesman and administrators, and today they provide a fascinating window on an age. In his native Trento, in the magnificent Castello di Buonconsiglio, there are two characteristic portrait busts of Venetian notables. But by far the best place to admire Vittoria’s work is Venice: in Ca’ d’Oro, in the Frari, the Museo Correr, the Doge’s Palace.

Two examples of Vittoria’s portrait busts of dignitaries of his day. In Castello di Buonconsiglio, Trento (top) and in Ca’ D’Oro, Venice (bottom).

Vittoria was a contemporary of Tintoretto and Veronese, and with them he helped Venice in her project of self-glamorisation in an era when her best days were already beginning to be behind her. We know where Vittoria lived in Venice: his house was just off the Riva degli Schiavoni behind the church of the Pietà. A hotel stands on the site of the building today. Here he had a beautiful garden and a fine collection of works of art, including a marvellous self-portrait by Parmagianino, shown reflected in a convex mirror (also now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum). When he died, he was buried in the nearby church of San Zaccaria: his tomb slab is very simple, a black flagstone laid in the floor of the sanctuary. On the wall next to it, however, is an elaborate monument designed by himself with a portrait bust in the antique style and mourning figures of Sculpture, Painting and Architecture.

Monument to Alessandro Vittoria in San Zaccaria, Venice. The Latin description praises him as someone ‘who when alive drew out from marble the faces of the living’. (The sculptures of Architecture and Painting appear to have been miscaptioned.)

Annabel Barber

See here for details of our relevant titles: Blue Guide Venice and Blue Guide Trentino & the South Tyrol.

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Blue Guides: Now in colour

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Blue Guide Venice (ed. 10) is now in full colour, the first of a new look for the core series.

Since 1918, when the first Blue Guide appeared, the books have been through a number of redesigns but the quality of the text remains completely unchanged. The detailed focus on history, archaeology, architecture and art is exactly the same, the product of careful study and painstaking on-the-ground research. Now, though, all the maps, plans, illustrations and photographs are beautifully reproduced in colour – essential for presenting works of art, for showing the light and subtle shades of the lagoon, and for making maps that are easy to read and navigate.

Blue Guide Venice (ed. 10) is available in bookshops from March (UK) and May (US). As a taster, here a few sample pages from the new edition:

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Venice in Peril

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The UK-based Venice in Peril Fund is one of several international charities devoted to safeguarding the future of this unique city. Guy Elliott, Chairman of Venice in Peril, outlines some of its recent projects.

The Venice in Peril Fund was founded in 1971, succeeding an earlier fund instituted in 1966 in response to that year’s devastating floods. Today, more than 50 years later, Venice may be in even greater peril. Climate change is increasing the frequency of high tide occurrences, known as Acqua alta. These, as well as causing flooding, allow saline penetration of the brick which lies above the hard Istrian stone foundations. In certain atmospheric conditions, these saline deposits crystallise, causing the mortar and brick to fragment. Rising sea levels will only accentuate this problem. Other factors, such as more turbulent water traffic and deteriorating air quality, also contribute to the degradation. Taken together these threats pose an existential threat to the city.

Over this long period, Venice in Peril has focused chiefly on the conservation of monuments, especially in stone, for example the Porta della Carta (Doge’s Palace) or the Loggetta around the campanile. But the charity has also conserved works of art and smaller projects ranging from a globe by Vincenzo Coronelli to 18 Goldoni puppets. Over 75 projects have been carried out using its funding alongside the City, Museum and Church authorities. At the same time the charity has aimed to broaden public understanding of the city’s challenges. 

One of Venice in Peril’s most recently completed conservation projects is the monument to Antonio Canova in the Frari church. Within it lies his heart. The rest of his remains—except for his right hand, which is in the Accademia Galleries—are at Possagno, his birthplace. The remarkable pyramid-shaped monument, built according to Canova’s design for a monument to Titian that was never executed, was inaugurated on the 200th anniversary of the great sculptor‘s death. British donors were prominent among those who financed its construction in the 1820s and Venice in Peril’s present supporters carry on the same proud tradition. The conservation project took ten years to complete and its challenges reflect all the environmental assaults described above. In addition, the problems of earlier conservation efforts (which followed best practice at the time) needed to be reversed. Major projects such as this provide training opportunities for young conservators as well as highlighting the harmful effects of neglecting maintenance, which is everywhere accorded low priority.

Detail of the restored monument to Canova, in the Frari church.

These same problems of Venice’s foundations being eaten away or suffering other environmental damage have been the focus of the charity in many other projects. One example is at the imposing Gothic church of Madonna del Orto in Cannaregio. Another is at the Basilica of Torcello, where recently the iconostasis was conserved. An ongoing project is at the Archivo de Stato, where following our earlier restorations of its main monumental doorway and its Baroque well-head, further interventions are planned to the archangels guarding the corners of this former cloister, once attached to the Frari. 

The Italian authorities, despite many competing demands placed on them, are not altogether neglecting the challenges which Venice faces. The massive MOSE project, which consists of retractable floodgates built between the outermost islands of the lagoon, has been a welcome development—unfortunately not operational for the Acqua alta of 2019, the worst since 1966. The MOSE barriers were first raised in October 2020. On a smaller scale, a glass barrier has been put in place around San Marco, reflecting the basilica’s position as one of the lowest lying points in the city. Venice in Peril has likewise assisted San Nicolò dei Mendicoli with similar counter-measures, the latest after the 2019 flooding, in a series of interventions at the church made since the 1970s. 

Venice’s challenges are not confined to the environment. As is well known, giant cruise liners have been controversial. Their enormous scale, dwarfing the city’s greatest monuments, caused much offence. Since 2021 ships over 25,000 tonnes are no longer permitted to sail up the Giudecca Canal or moor in the basin of San Marco. They instead take a different route to the port of Marghera on the mainland. While this diminishes the visual impact, nothing changes the disgorgement of very large numbers of passengers who make a negligible contribution to the city’s economy since they tend not to stay overnight. In 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, the city had 5.5 m overnight stays and 13 m overall visitors. The pandemic emptied Venice, but since 2022 tourism has resumed, with all that that entails. 

The city’s overdependence on tourism has changed the housing rental sector. Many residents have quit the old city for the mainland, renting out their apartments, often in an unregulated manner. This undermines the formal hotel and pensione sector. It also accelerates depopulation. Venice’s present population, which has been consistently falling, is around 50,000 as against its peak of 175,000 in the early 1950s. This partly reflects the lack of employment prospects, especially for young people, except in the tourist sector. 

As well as diverting the giant cruise liners, a daily levy has been introduced for day trippers. This innovation, like several others, has been controversial. But the scale of challenges that Venice faces requires considerable imagination. In many areas, solutions have proved elusive. Often, unpleasant choices need to be made in order to safeguard one of mankind’s most sublime achievements. This will not be the last such case. 

Venice in Peril Fund offers a unique and worthwhile channel to those who love the city, enabling them to discover more about Venice while contributing to conservation that can encourage sustainability and assist economic renewal. The website www.veniceinperil.org gives details about past and present projects and enables donations to be made easily. Funds are always needed to keep pace with the seemingly inexhaustible list of endangered buildings, monuments, sculptures and works of art. The charity holds regular events for its supporters, and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram.

Venice in Peril thanks the publishers of the excellent Blue Guide for again giving us space to explain our purpose and why it matters to those who love the city.

Guy Elliott, Chairman, Venice in Peril Fund CIO

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