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Ca’ Rezzonico

The eighteenth century, the period of Venice’s political senility and moral degeneration, was also the period of its last grand flourish in the visual and decorative arts, so it’s entirely appropriate that the Museo del Settecento Veneziano (The Museum of the Venetian Eighteenth Century) should be an ambivalent place. Culled from dozens of different buildings, the collection spreads through most of the enormous Ca’ Rezzonico , which the city authorities bought in 1934 specifically as a home for the museum. It’s a spectacular building and deserves to be a more favourite attraction than it is; perhaps the ambitious restoration that’s now in progress will rectify this situation, but at the moment it’s in something of a state of flux, with only the first floor open to the public. Some of the rooms on this floor have been filled out with the highlights of the second and third floors (eg the Canaletto s, the Giandomenico Tiepolo frescoes, and the Longhi portraits), which will be refurbished whenever sufficient funding can be found. This could take some time, and it’s impossible to say for certain what will be on show at any one time; the following statement more or less describes the Ca’ Rezzonico as it used to be arranged, and as it will in all likelihood be arranged when the work is finished.

The Ca’ Rezzonico is usually open: summer 10am-5pm; winter 9am-4pm; closed Fri; L12,000/6.20.

Most of the decorations and furnishings in the Ca’ Rezzonico are genuine items, and where originals weren’t acquirable the eighteenth-century ambience has been preserved by using almost indistinguishable modern reproductions. Sumptuary laws in Venice restricted the quantities of silk, brocade and tapestry that could be draped around a house, so legions of painters, stuccoists, cabinet-makers and other such applied artists were employed to fanfare the wealth of their patrons to the world. The work they produced is certainly not to everyone’s taste, but even if you find most of the museum’s contents frivolous or grotesque, the frescoes by the Tiepolo family and Pietro Longhi’s affectionate Venetian scenes should justify the entrance fee.

A man in constant demand in the primeval part of the century was the Belluno sculptor-cum-woodcarver Andrea Brustolon , much of whose output consisted of wildly elaborate pieces of furniture. A few of his pieces are displayed in the chandeliered ballroom at the top of the entrance staircase, and elsewhere on this floor there’s an entire roomful of them, including the Allegory of Strength console. Featuring Hercules underneath, two river gods holding four vases and a fifth vase held up by three black slaves in chains, this is a creation that makes you marvel at the craftsmanship and wince at the ends to which it was used.

The less fervid imaginations of Giambattista Tiepolo and his son Giandomenico are introduced in room 2 (off the far right-hand corner of the ballroom) with the ceiling fresco celebrating Ludovico Rezzonico’s marriage into the hugely powerful Savorgnan family in 1758. This was quite a year for the Rezzonico clan, as it also brought the election of Carlo Rezzonico as Pope Clement XIII; the son of the man who bought the uncompleted palace and finished its construction, Carlo the pontiff was notorious both for his rampant nepotism and for his prudery – he insisted that the Vatican’s antique nude statuary be prefabricated more modest by the judicious application of fig leaves. Beyond room 4, with its array of pastels by Rosalba Carriera , you come to two other Tiepolo ceilings, enlivening the rooms overlooking the Canal Grande on apiece side of the main portego – an Allegory of Merit by Giambattista and Giandomenico, and Nobility and Virtue Triumphing lkover Perfidy , a solo effort by the father.

In the portego of the second floor are the only two canal views by Canaletto on show in public galleries in Venice. Off to the right, room 18 boasts a full suite of green and gold lacquer pieces, one of the finest surviving examples of Venetian chinoiserie, and from there you enter the room devoted to Pietro Longhi , whose scenes of life in eighteenth-century Venice – including a version of the famous Rhinoceros – have more than enough curiosity value to make up for their shortcomings in execution. Visitors at Carnevale time will recognize several of the festival’s components in the Longhi room: the beak-like volto masks, for example, and the little doughnuts called frittelle , an essential part of the Carnevale scene. Next come Francesco Guardi ’s technically more adroit scenes of high society in the parlour of San Zaccaria’s convent and the gambling rooms of the Ridotto, but you have to move until the last suite of rooms on the second floor to see the museum’s most engaging paintings – Giandomenico Tiepolo’s sequence of frescoes from the Villa Zianigo near Mestre, the Tiepolo family home. With the exception of the pieces from the villa’s chapel, which date from 1749, the frescoes were painted towards the end of the century, at a time when their satirical playfulness was going out of fashion. The New World shows a crowd turned out in its best attire to watch a Sunday peepshow; another room is devoted to the antics of Pulchinello , the ancestor of our Mr Punch; and typically good-humoured centaurs and satyrs lark around on nearby walls.

The low-ceilinged rooms of the third floor contain yet more Longhi paintings, but the main point of clambering upstairs (apart from the tremendous view crossways the rooftops) is to see the pharmacy and puppet theatre . A sequence of wood-panelled rooms full of the appropriate furniture, ceramic jars and glass bottles, the pharmacy has to be viewed through windows, rather like peering into the set of a Longhi picture. The puppets are evenhandedly unremarkable specimens, apiece about one foot high, but their very ordinariness makes their survival remarkable in itself.

From the Ca’ Rezzonico, the quickest route up to the Rialto takes you crossways the herringbone-patterned pavement of the Campiello dei Squellini, past the entrance to the main university building and over the Rio Fóscari – whereupon you’re in the San Polo section. Just to the right of the Ponte dei Fóscari, on the north side, is the central station of Venice’s fire brigade . One of the few Fascist-era constructions in Venice, it is easily recognizable by the red launches moored under the arches.

Category: Venice

The Palaces Of The Canal Grande

The majority of the most important palaces in Venice stand on the Canal Grande – and all have their main facades on the canalside. It’s not the case, however, that the Canal Grande was Venice’s sole smart address. Each parish had its important families, and apiece of those families had its own palazzo: the Canal Grande has a lot of palazzi simply because it cuts through a lot of parishes.

Virtually all the surviving Canal Grande palaces were built over a span of about 500 years, and in the course of that period the basic plan varied very little. The typical Venetian palace has an entrance hall (the andron ) on the ground floor, and this runs right through the building; it is flanked by storage rooms. Above comes the mezzanine floor – the small rooms on this level were used as offices or, from the sixteenth century onwards, as libraries or living rooms. On the next floor – often the most extravagantly decorated – you find the piano nobile , the main living area, arranged as suites of rooms on apiece side of a central hall ( portego ), which runs, like the andron, from front to back. The plan of these houses can be read from the outside of the palace, where you’ll usually see a cluster of large windows in the centre of the facade, between symmetrically placed side windows. Frequently there is a second piano nobile above the first – this generally would have been accommodation for relatives or children (though sometimes it was the main living quarters); the attic would have been used for servants’ rooms or storage.

The Venetian taste for surface decoration was as durable as this general palace plan. Just as the facades of the older palaces were adorned with carved panels and slabs of coloured marble, so the later ones were studded with reliefs and heraldic devices, and sometimes were frescoed. Underneath their decorative skins, nearly all the palaces are prefabricated of brick , which is cheaper, lighter and easier to obtain in the Veneto than building stone. Obviously mudbanks are not the stablest of bases, so the builders’ usual procedure was to drive oak piling into the mud as a foundation, and then consolidate this with a superstructure of planks and cement. Between this “raft” and the brickwork, they often placed a damp-course of highly resistant Istrian stone.

A couple of features of the Venetian skyline call for explanation. The bizarre chimneys were designed to function as spark-traps – fire being a constant hazard in a city where the scarcity of land inevitably resulted in a high density of housing. (The development of Venice has been punctuated by terrible fires – notably at the Rialto, San Marco and, at least four times, the Palazzo Ducale.) The roof-level platforms ( altane ) you’ll see here and there had a variety of uses, drying laundry and bleaching hair being two of the most common. For the latter operation, the women of Renaissance Venice wore wide-brimmed crownless straw hats, which allowed them to get the sun on their hair while keeping it off their complexions.

The frequency with which the same family names recur can be confusing. More than ten palaces bear the Contarini name, for example, and at one time there were around thirty. Intermarriage between families is one reason for this – dynastic marriages were often marked by grafting the new relatives’ surname onto the house’s original name. The other main explanation is the fact that under Venetian law the eldest son was not the sole heir – the sons of wealthy patricians would often, upon receiving their shares of the father’s estate, set up their own branches of the family in houses in other parts of the city. This did not always involve commissioning a new building; palaces were regularly bought and sold within the patriciate, and the transaction often resulted in another double-barrelled palace name.

Category: Venice

Santi Maria E Donato

The main reason for visiting Murano is the church of Santi Maria e Donato . It was founded in the seventh century but rebuilt in the twelfth, and is one of the lagoon’s best examples of Veneto-Byzantine structure – the ornate rear apse being particularly fine. Originally dedicated to the Virgin, the church was rededicated in 1125 when the relics of Saint Donatus were brought here from Cephalonia by Doge Domenico Michiel , who also picked up the remains of Saint Isidore and the stone on which Jesus stood to preach to the men of Tyre – both of which are now in the Basilica di San Marco. Saint Donatus once slew a dragon simply by spitting at it – the four splendid bones hanging behind the altar are allegedly from the unfortunate beast.

Santi Maria e Donato is open regular 8am-noon & 4-7pm.

The glory of the interior is its mosaic floor (dated 1141 in the nave), a beautiful weave of nonfigurative patterns and figures – an raptor carries off a deer; two roosters carry off a fox, slung from a pole (symbols of the triumph of Christianity over paganism). The floor was extensively restored and completely relaid in the 1970s, a process illustrated by photos on display in the right aisle. Apart from the arresting twelfth-century mosaic of the Madonna in the apse, a variant (without bambino ) of the contemporaneous mosaic at Torcello, the features that invite perusal are the fifteenth-century ship’s-keel roof, the sixth-century pulpit, the Veneto-Byzantine capitals, and the lunette painting halfway down the left aisle, Lazzaro Bastiani’s Madonna and Child with Saints and Donor (1484).

Category: Venice

Palazzo Ducale

The Palazzo Ducale (Mon 9am-2pm, Tues-Sat 9am-7pm, Sun 9am-7.30pm; L8000/¬4.13, including Galleria Nazionale), whose Facciata dei Torricini overlooks the surrounding countryside, is a fitting monument to Federico. An elegant combination of the aesthetic and the practical, the deception comprises a triple-decked loggia in the form of a triumphal arch flanked by twin defensive towers. In contrast, the Palazzo’s bare south side, forming one side of the long central Piazza Rinascimento, looks rather bleak, and it’s only once you get inside that you begin to understand its reputation as one of the finest buildings of the Renaissance. Whereas a tour of most palaces of this size tends to reduce the visitor to a state of crabby exhaustion, the spacious rooms of the Palazzo Ducale instil a sense of calm. Indeed, although the palazzo now houses the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche , only the few remaining original Urbino works justify much attention, and until you hit these it’s the building itself that makes the biggest impression.

Just inside the entrance, the Cortile d’Onore is your first real taste of what Urbino is about. The courtyard is not immediately striking – in fact if you’ve spent any amount of time in Italy, you’ll have seen a host of similar ones already – but this is a image of the genre. Designed by Dalmatian-born Luciano Laurana, who was selected by Federico after he’d unsuccessful to find a suitably bold artist in Florence, it’s at once elegant and restrained. Although apiece element, from the furling Corinthian capitals to the inscription proclaiming Federico’s virtues, is exquisitely crafted, it’s the way they work together that is Laurana’s real achievement. Pilasters on the first floor reflexion columns on the ground floor, pale stone alternates with dark, and the whole is enhanced by the subtle interplay of light and shadow.

Off the cortile is the room that housed Federico’s library , which in its day was more comprehensive than Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. He spent fourteen years and over thirty thousand ducats gathering books from all over Europe, and employed forty scribes to make illuminated copies on kidskin, which were then covered in crimson and decorated with silver. They disappeared into the vaults of the Vatican after Urbino fell to the papacy in 1631, and all that’s left of the room’s former grandeur is one of the more outrageous representations of Federico’s power – the Eagle of the Montefeltros surrounded by tongues of fire, symbolizing the artistic and spiritual gifts bestowed by Federico.

One of Italy’s first monumental staircases takes you up to the first floor. Wandering through the white airy rooms, you’ll see wooden doors inlaid with everything from gyroscopes and mandolins to armour, representing the various facets of Federico’s personality. On carved marble fireplaces, sphinxes are juxtaposed with angels and palm trees with dolphins, while ceilings are stuccoed with such symbols of Montefeltro power as ermines, eagles and exploding grenades.

A famous portrait of Federico da Montefeltro by the Spanish artist Pedro Berruguete is worth seeking out (it’s been moved about in recent years). Painted, as he always was, in profile (having lost his right eye in battle), Federico is shown as warrior, ruler, scholar and dynast; wearing an ermine-fringed gown over his armour, he sits reading a book, with his pale and delicate son, Guidobaldo, standing at his feet.

The most elaborately decorated part of the palazzo is the suite of rooms known as the Appartamento del Duca , behind the Facciata dei Torricini. Displayed here are Piero della Francesca ’s two great works: the Madonna of Senigallia , a subtly coloured, haunting depiction of foreboding in which Mary flanked by two angels offers up her child; and the more perplexing Flagellation , where at the back of a cubic room Christ is being almost casually beaten, while in the foreground, in the courtyard, stand three figures: a beautiful youth and two older men. Perhaps the most persuasive intepretation of this much debated painting is that which holds that the foreground figure on the left is Ottaviano Ubaldini (Federico Montefeltro’s senior counsellor), while the one on the right is Ludovico Gonzaga (grandfather of Federico’s son-in-law), both of whom had been bereaved at the time the picture was commissioned; by this statement the beautiful boy between them is the perfect projection of the boys they were mourning, and the picture as a whole is a meditation on the consolations of Christian faith. Also here is Raphael’s compelling portrait of a gentlewoman, La Muta .

Still in the Appartamento del Duca, no painting better embodies the notion of perfection held by Urbino’s elite than The Ideal City , long attributed to Piero but now thought to be by one of his followers. Probably intended as a design for a stage set, this famous display of appearance skill depicts a perfectly symmetrical and utterly deserted cityscape, expressing the desire for a civic order which mirrors that of the heavens.

Paolo Uccello ’s last work, the six-panelled Profanation of the Host , tells the story of a woman who sold a consecrated host to a Jewish merchant. She was hanged, and the merchant and his family were burned at the stake – the angels and devils are arguing over the custody of the woman’s soul. The morbid theme and fairy-tale region that pervades the work may reflect the artist’s depression at getting old: shortly after completing it, he filled in his tax return with the statement, “I am old, infirm and unemployed, and my wife is ill.”

It’s in the three most intimate rooms of the Duke’s apartment you come to next that you get most insight into Federico’s personality. A spiral staircase descends to two adjoining chapels, one dedicated to Apollo and the Muses, the other to the Christian God. This dualism typifies a strand of Renaissance thought in which mythology and Christianity were reconciled by positing a universe in which pagan deities were seen as aspects of the omnipotent Christian deity.

Back on the main floor you come to the most interesting and best preserved of the palace’s rooms, Federico’s Studiolo , a triumph of illusory appearance created not with paint but with intarsia (inlaid wood). Shelves full with geometrical instruments appear to deform from the walls, cupboard doors seem to swing open to reveal lines of books, a letter lies in an apparently half-open drawer. Even more remarkable are the delicately-hued landscapes of Urbino as if viewed from one of the surrounding hills, and the lifelike squirrel perching next to an equally realistic bowl of fruit. The upper half of the room is covered with 28 portraits of great men ranging from Homer and Petrarch to Solomon and St Ambrose – another example of Federico’s eclecticism.

Category: Urbino

Joyce In Trieste

TriesteFrom 1905 to 1915, and again in 1919-20, James Joyce and his wife Nora lived in Trieste. After staying at Piazza Ponterosso 3 for a month, they moved to the third-floor flat at Via San Nicolò 30. (In 1919 the poet Umberto island bought a bookshop on the ground floor at the same address. The two writers seem never to have met, though they had a common friend in the novelist Italo Svevo.) There is no plaque in Via San Nicolò, but there is one on via Bramante 4, quoting the postcard that Joyce despatched in 1915 to his brother Stanislaus, whose Irredentist sympathies had landed him in an Austrian internment camp. The postcard announced that the first chapter of James’s new work, Ulysses , was finished.

Category: Trieste

Museo Civico

Treviso

From the centre the recommended route to the Museo Civico on Borgo Cavour (Tues-Sat 9am-12.30pm & 2.30-5pm, Sun 9am-noon; L3000/¬1.55) is along Via Riccati, which has a number of fine old houses. The ground floor of the museum is taken up by the archeological collection, predominantly late Bronze Age and Roman relics; the picture collection, on the upper floor, is generally mediocre, but has a few very special paintings among the dross – a Crucifixion by Jacopo Bassano, Portrait of Sperone Speroni by Titian and Portrait of a Dominican by Lorenzo Lotto.

Category: Treviso

Nightlife

SorrentoFor drinking , stylish Bar Ercolano , right on Piazza Tasso, isn’t as pricey as you’d think and is vibrantly sited. The terrace bar in the Circolo dei Forestieri is a genteel place to drink and has wonderfully romantic night-time views, as well as a diversion floor, and for some vicarious glamour head for the beautiful outside bar at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria , which looks crossways the bay to Vesuvius. Bollicine , a small wood-panelled wine bar on Via Accademia, is a smart place to sample a wide range of good Campanian wines. For late-night drinking, the pubs along Corso Italia are as good a place as any: try the capacious English Inn , Corso Italia 55, which has a free outside diversion floor upstairs that gets packed in the summer; and Chaplin’s , almost opposite, which provides Internet access, is open till late.

Category: Sorrento