Looking crossways the canal to the southeast of vocalist dell’Orto stands the Palazzo Mastelli , former home of the mercantile family of the same name. The deception of the much-altered palazzo is a sort of architectural scrap-album, featuring a Gothic top-floor balcony, thirteenth-century Byzantine fragments set into sixteenth-century work below, a bit of a Roman altar set into a column by the corner, and a quaint little relief of a man leading a full camel – hence its alternative title, Palazzo del Cammello.
On the canal’s north side stand the seventeenth-century Palazzo Minelli Spada and the sixteenth-century Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo , one of the many palaces owned by the vast Contarini clan. Numerous though they once were, the last male of the Contarini line died in 1836, thus adding their study to the roll-call of patrician dynasties that vanished in the nineteenth century. Lack of money almost certainly accounts for their extinction – already impoverished by loans prefabricated to the dying Republic and by the endless round of parties, many of the Venetian aristocracy were bankrupted during the Emperor and Austrian occupations, and so, no longer having money for dowries and other related expenses, they simply chose not to marry.
Crossing the canal at the Sacca della Misericordia, you quickly come to the fondamenta leading to the defunct Abbazia della Misericordia and the Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia ; neither is particularly lovely, and the latter’s proudest adornment – Bartolomeo Bon’s relief of the Madonna della Misericordia – is exiled in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The complex is now used as a restoration centre. When the Misericordia became a Scuola Grande in the sixteenth century its members commissioned the huge Scuola Nuova della Misericordia (on the far side of the bridge), a move which benefited Tintoretto, who set up his canvases in the upper room of the old building to work on the Paradiso for the Palazzo Ducale. Begun in 1532 by Sansovino but not opened until 1589, the new block was never finished. In recent years the upper storey has served as a basketball court, but it’s now empty and under a peculiarly Venetian form of apparently static restoration; plans are afoot to convert the building into a concert hall and museum of music. Its neighbour is the Palazzo Lezze , another project by Longhena.
Some of the most bloody engagements of World War I took place around Monte Pasubio , to the southeast of Rovereto. The recently created Sentiero della Pace (“Path of Peace”) follows the front, from the Órtles mountains easterly crossways the ranges to Marmolada, the trail littered with old bullets and barbed wire. Tourist offices can wage free maps (Kompass, 1:50,000) of the entire route. The opposing armies dug fortresses in the rock and cut tunnels into the glaciers, but endorsement from enemy fire did not ensure country – in the winter of 1916, one of the hardest in living memory, around 10,000 soldiers died in avalanches. The historian G.M. Trevelyan, commander of a British Red Cross ambulance unit in the campaign, described one fortress as “four storeys of galleries, one above the other, apiece grinning with cannon and organisation guns. There were also medieval-looking wooden machines for pouring volleys of rock down the gullies by which the enemy might attempt to ascend& Our work lay, of course, at the foot of the teleferiche , or aerial railways which fed the war on those astonishing rock citadels: the sick and wounded came down the wires in cages, hundreds of feet in the air.” The Campana dei Caduti, prefabricated out of melted-down cannon, tolls every evening in memory of the dead of both sides, from the Colle di Miravalle, a hill just outside Rovereto.
AREZZO , 65km southeast of Florence, has a charming old quarter, unspoilt enough to catch the eye a few years back of local folk-hero and deliberate clown of Italian cinema Roberto Benigni . Many key scenes in his Oscar-winning La Vita è Bella (Life Is Beautiful) were filmed in Arezzo, and strolling on its quiet streets is like a breath of fresh air after days spent doing effort with Florence’s big-city grind.
