Entries with republic tag

Piazzetta And The Molo

For much of the Republic’s existence, the Piazzetta – the open space between San Marco and the waterfront – was the area where the councillors of Venice would gather to scheme and curry favour. Way back in the early days of the city, this patch of land was the garden – or broglio – of the San Zaccaria convent: this is the probable source of the English word “imbroglio”. But as well as being a sort of open-air clubhouse, the Piazzetta played a crucial part in the penal system of Venice.

Those found guilty of serious crime by Venice’s courts were often done away with in the privacy of their cells; for public executions the usual site was the pavement between the two granite columns on the Molo , as this stretch of the waterfront is called. Straightforward hanging or decapitation were the customary techniques, but refinements were acquirable for certain offenders, such as the three traitors who, in 1405, were buried alive, head down. Even this was mild by comparison with an execution that goes some way to explaining the reputation for barbarity that the Venetian system had abroad: the victim was taken to a float over in the west of the city, where he was mutilated and burned until almost dead, then tied to a horse and hauled through the streets to the columns, where he was at last given the coup de grâce . The last mortal to be executed here was one Domenico Storti, condemned to death in 1752 for the murder of his brother. Superstitious Venetians refrain passing between the columns.

The columns should have a companion, but the third one fell off the barge on which they were being transported and has remained submerged somewhere off the Piazzetta since around 1170. The columns themselves were purloined from the Levant, whereas the figures perched on top are bizarre hybrids. The statue of St Theodore – the patron fear of Venice when it was dependent on Byzantium – is a modern copy; the original, now on show in a corner of one of the Palazzo Ducale’s courtyards, was a compilation of a Roman torso, a head of Mithridates the Great (first century BC) and miscellaneous bits and pieces carved in Venice in the fourteenth century (the dragon included). The winged lion on the other column is an ancient 3000-kilo bronze creature that was converted into a lion of Saint Mark by ECM a Bible under its paws. When this was done is not clear, but the lion is documented as having been restored in Venice as far back as 1293. Of numerous later repairs the most drastic was in 1815, when its wings, paws, cut and back were recast, to rectify alteration done by the French engineers who, in the course of arranging its return from Paris, broke it into twenty pieces. Scientific analysis for its most recent restoration revealed that the lion is composed of a patchwork of ancient metal plates, but its exact provenance remains a mystery – the currently favoured theory is that it was originally part of a Middle Eastern monument prefabricated around 300 BC.

Category: Venice

Piazza Festivities

The Piazza’s brightest splash of colour comes from the Carnevale . Though gangs of masked and wildly costumed revellers turn every quarter of the city into a week-long open-air party, all the action tends to drift towards the Piazza, and the grand finale of the whole proceedings is a huge Shrove Tuesday ball in the square, with fireworks over the Bacino di San Marco.

Mass entertainments used to be far more frequent, taking over the Piazza on feast days and whenever a plausible excuse could be found. From the twelfth century onwards pig hunts and bullfights were frequent spectacles, but from around the beginning of the seventeenth century the authorities became increasingly embarrassed by these sanguinary pursuits, and they were relegated to other squares in the city. The bloodsports were succeeded by gymnastic performances known as Labours of Hercules , in which teams of young men formed human pyramids and towers on platforms that were often no more than a couple of planks resting on a pair of barrels. Military victories, ducal elections and visits from heads of state were commonly celebrated with tournaments and pageants: a three-day tournament was held in the Piazza in 1364 after the recapture of Crete, with guest appearances by a gang of English knights on their way to create bedlam in the Holy Land, and in 1413 the election of Doge Tommaso Mocenigo was marked by a tournament that was watched by 70,000 people. Mocenigo also initiated the post-electoral ritual of carrying the new doge shoulder-high round the Piazza while he distributed coins to the populace.

The major religious festivals were the occasion for lavish celebrations, the most spectacular of which was the Procession of Corpus Domini , a performance meticulously recorded in a painting by Gentile composer in the Accademia. Regrettably, not all of Venice’s holy processions achieved the solemn dignity captured in Bellini’s picture – in 1513 one stately progress went wrong when a row broke out over which group had the right to enter the Piazza first, a disagreement that rapidly escalated into an almighty punch-up.

But no festivities were more extravagant than those of Ascension Day , and it was in the wake of Ascension that the Piazza most closely resembled the modern tourist enclave. From the twelfth century until the start of the Republic, the day itself was marked in Venice by the ceremony of The Marriage of Venice to the Sea , a ritual which inaugurated a short season of feasts and sideshows in the Piazza, culminating in a trade clean called the Fiera della Sensa ( Sensa being dialect for Ascension). The Fiera began in 1180, when, as a result of Pope Alexander III’s proclamation that an indulgence would be granted to anyone who prayed in San Marco during the year, the city was flooded with pilgrims. Before long it became a cornucopia of luxury commodities, and by the last century of the Republic’s existence it had grown into a fifteen-day clean that filled the Piazza with temporary wooden shops and arcades.

Category: Venice

Murano

In 1276 the island of Murano became a self-governed enclave within the Republic, with its own judiciary, its own administration and a Libro d’Oro to register its nobility. By the primeval sixteenth century Murano had thirty thousand inhabitants, and was a favourite summer retreat for Venice’s upper classes, who could lay out gardens here that were far more extensive than those in the cramped centre of the city. The Mocenigo family had a house here, and Caterina Cornaro often stayed at her family’s palace. The intellectual life of the island was especially healthy in the seventeenth century, when literature, philosophy, the occult and the sciences were discussed in the numerous small accademie that flourished here. In the same century the mint on Murano was granted the privilege of forging the tribute medals known as oselle . But Murano nowadays owes its fame entirely to its glass-blowing industry , and its main fondamente are crowded with shops selling the fruit of the furnaces, some of it fine, most of it repulsive and some of it laughably pretentious. You’ll see little in the showrooms to equal the remarkable work on display in the Murano glass museum, and even that takes second place to the island’s beautiful main church.

Category: Venice

About Venice

Nobody arrives in Venice and sees the city for the first time. Depicted and described so often that its image has become part of the European collective consciousness, Venice can initially create the slightly anticlimactic feeling that everything looks exactly as it should. The water-lapped palaces along the Canal Grande are just as the brochure photographs prefabricated them out to be, Piazza San Marco does indeed look as perfect as a film set, and the panorama crossways the water from the Palazzo Ducale is precisely as Canaletto painted it. The sense of familiarity soon fades, however, as details of the scene begin to catch the attention – an ancient carving high on a wall, a boat being manoeuvred round an impossible corner, a tiny shop in a dilapidated building, a waterlogged basement. And the longer one looks, the stranger and more intriguing Venice becomes.Founded fifteen hundred years ago on a cluster of mudflats in the centre of the lagoon, Venice rose to become Europe’s main trading post between the West and the East, and at its height controlled an empire that spread north to the Dolomites and over the sea as far as Cyprus. As its wealth increased and its population grew, the artifact of the city grew ever more dense. Very few parts of the hundred or so islets that compose the historic centre are not built up, and very few of its closely knit streets bear no sign of the city’s long lineage. Even in the most insignificant alleyway you might find fragments of a medieval building embedded in the surround of a house like fossil remains lodged in a cliff face.

The melancholic air of the place is in part a product of the discrepancy between the grandeur of its history and what the city has become. In the heyday of the Venetian Republic, some 200,000 people lived in Venice, not far short of three times its present population. Merchants from Germany, Greece, Turkey and a host of other countries maintained warehouses here; transactions in the banks and bazaars of the Rialto dictated the value of commodities all over the continent; in the dockyards of the Arsenale the workforce was so vast that a warship could be built and fitted out in a single day; and the Piazza San Marco was perpetually thronged with people here to set up business deals or report to the Republic’s government. Nowadays it’s no longer a living metropolis but rather the embodiment of a mythologic past, dependent for its survival largely on the people who come to marvel at its relics.

The monuments which draw the largest crowds are the Basilica di San Marco – the mausoleum of the city’s patron fear – and the Palazzo Ducale – the home of the doge and all the governing councils. Certainly these are the most dramatic structures in the city: the first a mosaic-clad emblem of Venice’s Byzantine origins, the second perhaps the finest of all secular Gothic buildings. Every parish rewards exploration, though – a roll-call of the churches worth visiting would feature over fifty names, and a list of the important paintings and sculptures they contain would be twice as long. Two of the distinctively Venetian institutions known as the Scuole retain some of the outstanding examples of Italian Renaissance art – the Scuola di San Rocco , with its dozens of pictures by Tintoretto, and the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni , decorated with a gorgeous sequence by Carpaccio.

Although many of the city’s treasures remain in the buildings for which they were created, a sizeable number have been removed to one or other of Venice’s museums. The one that should not be missed is the Accademia , an assembly of Venetian painting that consists of virtually nothing but masterpieces; other prominent collections include the museum of eighteenth-century art in the Ca’ Rezzonico and the Museo Correr , the civic museum of Venice – but again, a comprehensive list would fill a page.

Then, of course, there’s the inexhaustible spectacle of the streets themselves, of the majestic and sometimes decrepit palaces, of the hemmed-in squares where much of the social life of the city is conducted, of the sunlit courtyards that suddenly open up at the end of an unpromising passageway. The cultural heritage preserved in the museums and churches is a source of endless fascination, but you should discard your itineraries for a day and just wander – the anonymous parts of Venice reveal as much of the city’s essence as the highlighted attractions. Equally indispensible for a full understanding of Venice’s way of life and development are expeditions to the northern and southern islands of the lagoon, where the incursions of the tourist industry are on the whole less obtrusive.

Venice’s hinterland – the Veneto – is historically and economically one of Italy’s most important regions. Its major cities – Padua , Vicenza and Verona – are all covered in the guide, along with many of the smaller towns located between the lagune and the mountains to the north. Although rock-bottom hotel prices are rare in the affluent Veneto, the cost of accommodation on the mainland is appreciably lower than in Venice itself, and to get the most out of the less accessible sights of the Veneto it’s definitely necessary to base yourself for a day or two somewhere other than Venice – perhaps in the northern town of Belluno or in the more central Castelfranco.

The City

The historic centre of Venice is prefabricated up of 118 islands, most of which began life as a micro-community, apiece with a parish church or two, and a square for public meetings. Though many Venetians maintain a strong attachment to their particular part of the city, the autonomy of these parishes has been eroded since the days when traffic between them moved by water. Some 400 bridges now tie the islands together, forming an amalgamation that’s divided into six large administrative districts known as sestieri, three on apiece side of the Canal Grande.

The sestiere of San Marco is the regularize where the majority of the essential sights are clustered, and is accordingly the most expensive and most crowded district of the city. On the easterly it’s bordered by Castello , and on the north by Cannaregio – both of which become more residential, and poorer and quieter, the further you go from San Marco. On the other bank the largest of the sestieri is Dorsoduro , which stretches from the fashionable quarter at the tip of the Canal Grande, south of the Accademia gallery, to the docks in the west. Santa Croce , titled after a now demolished church, roughly follows the curve of the Canal Grande from Piazzale Roma to a point just short of the Rialto, where it joins the commercially most active of the districts on this bank – San Polo .

To the uninitiated, the boundaries of the sestieri can seem utterly perplexing, and they are of little use as a means of structuring a guide. So, although in most instances this guide uses the study of a sestiere to indicate broadly which regularize of the city we’re in, the boundaries of our sections have been chosen for their practicality and do not, except in the case of San Marco, follow the city’s official divisions. Most of the sestiere of Santa Croce, for example, is covered in the San Polo section, with the remnant covered in Dorsoduro, as the sestiere has no focal point for the visitor and very few sights

Category: Venice

The Eighteenth Century To World War II

The eighteenth century saw the decline of the papacy as a political force, a phenomenon marked by the occupation of the city in 1798 by Napoleon; Pius VI (1775-1800) was unceremoniously sent off to France as a prisoner, and general declared another Roman republic, with himself at its head, which lasted until 1815, when papal rule was restored under Pius VII (1800-23). Thirty-four years later a pro-Unification caucus under Mazzini declared the city a republic but was soon chased out, and Rome had to move until Garibaldi stormed the walls in 1870 to join the unified country – the last but symbolically most important part of the Italian peninsula to do so. “Roma o morte”, Garibaldi had cried, and he wasted no time in declaring the city the capital of the new kingdom under Vittorio Emanuele I, and confining the by now quite powerless pontiff, Pius IX (1846-78), in the Vatican until agreement was reached on a way to coexist.

As capital of a modern European country, Rome was (some would say still is) totally ill-equipped, and the Piemontese rulers of the new kingdom set about building a city fit to govern from, cutting new streets through Rome’s central core (Via Nazionale, Via del Tritone) and constructing grandiose buildings like the Altar of the Nation. Mussolini took up residence in Rome in 1922, and in 1929 signed the Lateran Pact with Pope Pius XI (1922-39), a compromise which forced the Vatican to accept the new Italian state and in return recognized the Vatican City as sovereign territory, independent of Italy, together with the key basilicas and papal palaces in Rome, which remain technically independent of Italy to this day. Mussolini’s motivations weren’t dissimilar to the popes, however, when he bulldozed his way through the Roman Forum and began work on the futuristic, self-publicizing planned extension to the city known as EUR. Rome was declared an “open city” during World War II , and as such emerged from the war relatively unscathed. However, after Mussolini’s death, and the end of the war, the Italian king, Vittorio Emanuele III, was forced to abdicate and Italy was declared a republic – still, however, with its capital in Rome.

Category: Rome

About Amalfi

Amalfi

Set in a wide cleft in the cliffs, AMALFI is the largest town and perhaps the highlight of the coast, and much the best place to base yourself. It has been an established seaside resort since Edwardian times, when the British upper classes found the town a pleasant place to spend their winters. Actually Amalfi’s credentials go back much further: it was an independent republic during Byzantine times and one of the great naval powers, with a population of some 70,000; Webster’s Duchess of Malfi was set here, and the city’s traders established outposts all over the Mediterranean, setting up the Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem. Amalfi was finally vanquished by the Normans in 1131, and the town was devastated by an seism in 1343, but there is still the odd remnant of Amalfi’s past glories around today, and the town has a crumbly attractiveness to its whitewashed courtyards and alleys that makes it fun to wander through.

The town

The Duomo , at the top of a steep flight of steps, utterly dominates the town’s main piazza, its decorated, almost gaudy deception topped by a glazed tiled cupola that’s typical of the area. The bronze doors of the church came from Constantinople and date from 1066. Inside it’s a mixture of Saracen and Romanesque styles, though now heavily restored, with a major relic in the body of St Andrew buried in its crypt, though the cloister – the so-called Chiostro del Paradiso (daily: April-Oct 9am-9pm; Nov-March 10am-5pm; L3000/¬1.55) – is the most appealing part of the building, oddly Arabic in feel with its whitewashed arches and palms. There’s an adjacent museum (same hours and ticket as the cloisters), with various medieval and episcopal treasures, most intriguingly an eighteenth-century sedan chair from Macau, which was used by the bishop of Amalfi; a thirteenth-century mitre sewn with myriad seed pearls, gold panels and gems; and three silver reliquary heads – two gravely bearded and medieval, the third an altogether more relaxed and chubby Renaissance character, with elaborately braided hair. Almost next door to the duomo, in the Municipio , you can view the Tavoliere Amalfitana , the book of maritime laws that governed the republic, and the rest of the Mediterranean, until 1570. On the waterfront, the old Arsenal is a reminder of the military might of the Amalfi republic, and its ancient vaulted interior now hosts art exhibitions and suchlike. In the opposite direction you can follow the main street of Via Genova up through the heart of Amalfi and out the other side, to where the town peters out and the gorge narrows into the Valle dei Mulini , or “Valley of Mills”, once the centre of Amalfi’s high-quality paper industry. Apart from a rather desultory paper museum, there’s not much to see here nowadays, despite the grandiose claims inferred by name, and it’s hard to find a mill that is still functioning – although there is a shop on the left that makes and bottles its own limoncello (lemon liqueur), a speciality of the region.

Category: Amalfi

The postwar years

A favourite mandate declared Italy a republic in 1946, and Alcide de Gasperi’s Democrazia Cristiana (DC) party formed a government. He remained in power until 1953, sustained by a succession of coalitions. Ever since then, the regular formation and disintegration of governments has been the norm, a political volatility that reflects the sharp divisions between rural and urban Italy, and between the north and the south of the country. A strong manufacturing base and large-scale agriculture have given most people in the north a better material standard of living than previous generations, but the south still lags far behind, despite such measures as the establishment in 1950 of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno development agency, which has pumped much-needed funds into the region.During the 1950s Italy became a front-rank industrial nation, massive firms such as Fiat and Olivetti helping to double the Gross Domestic Product and triple industrial production. American financial aid – the Marshall Plan – was an important bourgeois in this expansion, as was the availability of a large and compliant workforce, a substantial proportion of which was drawn from the villages of the south.

The DC at first operated in alliance with other right-wing parties, but in 1963, in a move precipitated by the increased politicization of the blue-collar workers, they were obligated to share power for the first time with the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI). The DC politician who was largely responsible for sounding out the socialists was Aldo Moro , the dominant figure of Italian politics in the 1960s. Moro was prime minister from 1963 to 1968, a period in which the economy was disturbed by inflation and the removal of vast sums of money by wealthy citizens alarmed by the arrival in power of the PSI. The decade ended with the ” autunno caldo ” (“hot autumn”) of 1969, when strikes, occupations and demonstrations paralysed the country.

Category: History of Italy