Each year, when I read the articles for "VeneziAltrove" I feel the way Mario Luzi expresses all too well in one of his poems: "You revive my expectations" A layman, I am personally amazed ah how automatically one becomes engrossed in the vortex of the diaspora of Venice's cultural heritage in (...)

In Cicerone, A guide to the enjoyment of works of art in Italy, a milestone in the history of art, Jacob Burckhardt admits that in 1855 in the whole of Italy he does not know of paintings by Antonello da Messina that can “definitely be attributed to him apart from the portrait of a man with (...)

Out of professional habit, I often find myself analyzing phenomena that gradually attract my attention from an opposite point of view. And it is because of this habit, not because of a snobbish temptation to go against the trend, that I have often asked myself what the other side of the (...)

"But what will they say?", the American magnate Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) asked while standing in front of his sublime works of art. He saw them as “living entities” capable of communicating with the viewer pausing to contemplate them from one of the sofas in the elegant, new building between (...)

“Militaire et mari” sings the tenor in the Figlia del Reggimento (Regiment’s Daughter) holding the scene with more “C” sharps than the history of music remembers. And, for years now, it is in that combination of roles that I find myself each time I pick up this Almanac, (Venezialtrove-almanac of the (...)

In Victorian Boston, at the end of XIXth century, a palace was built according to the canons of Venetian Renaissance architecture, to the specifications of a passionate collector, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). In the stillness of a park, Isabella conceived Fenway Court , a home to (...)

A corner of Venice on the banks of the Seine: a delightful unique treasure house full of masterpieces, some created and acquired in the former doge's city, but more often elsewhere in Italy and abroad. Splendid works by artists such as Vittore Carpaccio, Andrea Mantegna, and Carlo Crivelli, and (...)

The eighteenth century was the last century in which Venice was still great: ‘The greatest of all the Italian city-states’, sustains Michael Levey (in Painting in 18.century in Venice, London Phaidon Press, 1959). But despite the fact that Goethe continued to define her as such, she was no longer (...)