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The Lido Opens WiFi Gates for the Venice Film Festival

Biennale – City of Venice agreement

FREE WI-FI ACCESS ON THE LIDO

The Biennale and the City of Venice announce an important agreement to allow the public, the journalists and the operators of the Venice International Film Festival on the Lido free access to the Wi-Fi connection, through the broadband municipal network of the City of Venice, the development of which will be completed by Venis Spa on the island of the Lido in time for the inauguration of the Venice Film Festival.

It is not until a paragraph like this do you begin to realise just how fast some European countries have been developing, compared to others. Whereas in Manchester (U.K.) the virtual network covers the entire city centre, and a free access to the Internet is accepted as a norm and taken for granted, in Italy the development of the web access seems to be lagging behind so much that such a ‘natural’ development deserves a special mention.

No, I’m not having a laugh, but merely making a point. At the same time, this is a curious point to observe. I wonder if this could be the best illustration of the chasm between the new arts and the old arts, between the future-oriented, classic-defying FutureEverything and Manchester International Festival and the classy (too classy, perhaps) Venice Film Festival. The former have acquired access to the Internet and diverse other things, the latter is only just providing the artistic public with one of pre-requisites of modern-day communication and success.

It’s not a question of the old keeping abreast with the new; it’s the question of the old retaining its ability and authority to inspire the new. And for that, the old has to have access to, and the knowledge of, the language and lifestyle of the new.

Image courtesy of BrandChannel.

Italy Through the Russian Eyes: The Bay of Naples

Alexander Ivanov, The Bay of Naples near Castellmare (1846)

Alexander Ivanov, On the Shore of the Bay of Naples (1850s)

The Bay of Naples has traditionally been a favourite with painters. Peter Breugel the Elder’s view was rather “flat”, but in the 19th c. artists showed the Bay from many angles and in many weathers. The Russian painters particularly liked it, especially Alexander Ivanov. The Bay of Naples, as seen in Ivanov’s works, is an epitome of serenity and the heat of Southern Italy, even when Vesuvius lurks in the background. Another artist of Armenian origin, who became a well-known Russian marine painter, Ivan Aivazovsky, shows this area in the moonlight, when it acquires a purely Romanticist feel.

Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Bay of Naples (1556)

Alexander Ivanov, Torre del Greco near Pompeii and Naples (1846)

Alexander Ivanov, View of Naples from the Road in Pozilippe

Ivan Aivazovsky, The Bay of Naples by Moonlight (1842)

Italy Through the Russian Eyes: Alexander Ivanov – Via Appia at Sunset (1845)

Alexander Ivanov, the contemporary of Nikolai Gogol and Karl Brullov, spent a large part of his life in Italy where he also did many sketches for his masterpiece, The Appearance of Christ to the People. Via Appia at Sunset shows the oldest road in Campagna leading towards the barely seen St Peter’s Cathedral; along the road are the tombs of the first Christians. Ivanov called this landscape “historic” in the proper sense of the word.

Alexander Herzen wrote about this part of Italy: “always sad and gloomy, Campagna only once becomes magnificent, and that at sunset, when the land challenges the sea… Who never visited Italy does not know what the colour or light is… This sad Campagna is forever bound to the Roman ruins; they complement each other. Indeed, there is some incredible grandeur in all these stones. It is for a reason that every generation from every corner of the cultured world comes to pay them a homage” (translated from Russian).

Oscar Wilde – A Sonnet on Approaching Italy

I reached the Alps: the soul within me burned
Italia, my Italia, at thy name:
And when from out the mountain’s heart I came
And saw the land for which my life had yearned,

I laughed as one who some great prize had earned:
And musing on the story of thy fame
I watched the day, till marked with wounds of flame
The turquoise sky to burnished gold was turned,

The pine-trees waved as waves a woman’s hair,
And in the orchards every twining spray
Was breaking into flakes of blossoming foam:

But when I knew that far away at Rome
In evil bonds a second Peter lay,
I wept to see the land so very fair.

Oscar Wilde, Turin, 1877

Italy Through the Russian Eyes: Alexey Tyranov – A Portrait of an Italian Lady

Alexey Tyranov was born in 1801. Prior to going to the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg he worked alongside his brother as an icon painter. At the Academy he studied under Alexey Venetsianov, and from 1836 he studied under Karl Brullov.

A Portrait of an Italian Lady gently combines the Russian modesty and the sensuality of the Italian Renaissance, e.g. Titian’s Flora. The woman is pictured either before or after having a bath.

Italy Through the Russian Eyes: Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva – Venice

Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva lived all her life in St Petersburg where she was born in 1871. She was born into a family of a high official who eventually became a senator, and later married a renowned Russian chemist, hence her double surname. She studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Arts under Ilya Repin and then in Paris, in the studio of the American painter James Whistler. She found success as a part of The World of Art (Mir Iskusstva) group headed by Leon Bakst, under whose tutorship she also perfected her skills in watercolour painting.

Ostroumova-Lebedeva is credited with a revival of the techniques of engraving and woodcut in Russia. Her many works are images of St Petersburg and its environs, as well as those of foreign cities. On the engraving here, dated 1911, we see a rather atypical image of Venice: a canal flows along the dull, unadorned walls of the houses, and just about the only decorative detail is that of the rails of the bridge. A barely noticeable, lone spectator is caught in a moment of contemplation, while a bulky gondola passes under the bridge.

Italy Through the Russian Eyes: Grigory Gagarin – The Gondola Races in Venice

Prince Grigory Gagarin was born in St Petersburg in 1811. Having spent his youth with his parents in Paris and Rome where his father served as an ambassador, Gagarin went on to study in Siena, at the collegium Tolomei. He received no formal training in painting, but instead took lessons with Karl Brullov, the younger brother of Alexander.

The gay and colourful “Gondola Races on the Grand Canal in Venice” was painted in 1830s. We see the Renaissance Venice, as Gagarin carefully recreated the puff sleeves and handpieces. In the view is also the magnificent Ponte Rialto. And in the video you can see the historic Regatta as it happens these days.

Italy Through the Russian Eyes: Alexander Brullov – The Italian Ruins

Alexander Brullov was born on November 29, 1798 in St Petersburg in the family of Pavel Brullo, a sculptor and ornamental artist of French origin. With his brother, Karl, Alexander received a special pension from the Academy of Arts to travel to Italy to study the plastic arts. He spent 8 years travelling in Italy and France, and between 1824 and 1826 took part in restoring the Pompeii thermal baths. This latter work catapulted the young artist to fame: he was appointed the Chief Architect to the Emperor of Russia, and became a corresponding member and a member of the French Institute of Architects and the Royal Society of Architects of Britain, respectively. He also became a member of the Academies of Arts in St Petersburg (Russia) and Milan (Italy).

The watercolour The Italian Ruins was painted between 1822 and 1826. Bryullov manages to bring to the canvas all that could interest him as a painter and architect, starting with a bucolic scene featuring Italian peasants, through the attention to detail in the decor of the archs, and to the perspective that stretches up to the hill in the distance. The “ruins” seem to be scattered all over the place, as indeed befits Italy. As in Greece, these are as natural part of landscape as the mountains and sun, and the picture is literally sun-filled.

Italian Landscape in Photography at the Russian Museum

Credit: CRAF

Yesterday in St Petersburg there opened an exhibition of Italian landscape photography organised by the Italian Cultural Institute (RU) and the CRAF Centre of Research and Archivation of Photography (IT). The exhibition is a part of the Year of Italian Language and Culture in Russia and presents to the Russians and the visitors of St Petersburg the ways the Italian photography have developed in the last 50 years, between 1950s and 2000s. On view are photographs from the CRAF, the Touring Club Italiano archives, the Galica gallery, and private collections.

Among the earliest photos there are presented the works of the after-war decade showing the documental or neorealist way in the Italian photography. The period from the 1960’s to 1980’s is marked by appearance of new themes and subjects that have a special actuality up to now. Among them there is the extermination of nature as the result of a human negligence, the negative sides of the invasion of the modern architecture and advertisement in the urban space, the incessant changes of the natural landscape. In the landscape photos of the 1990s–2000s the traditional and innovatory means of expressiveness, the realistic and abstract forms, documental exactness and the high measure of the artistic generalization are organically combined.

And a short extract from the announcement on the CRAF website:

The exhibition will range over the second half of the 20th century, highlighting the different ways of approaching the Italian landscape by the different “schools of thought to which the following artists belonged: the pictorialists such as Riccardo Peretti Griva, Silvio Maria Bujatti, Renzo Pavonello, the Studio Giacomelli of Venice and Riccardo Moncalvo; the photographers approaching Croce’s aesthetics such as Giuseppe Cavalli, Ferruccio Leiss, Federico Vender, Piergiorgio Branzi, Giuseppe Moder, Raffaele Rotondo, and even Bruno Stefani, the great landscapist of the Italian Touring Club; the artists of La Gondola such as Gianni Berengo Gardin, Elio Ciol, Lucia Sisti, Gino Bolognini, Toni Del Tin, Fulvio Roiter, Giuseppe Bruno, Giorgio Giacobbi, Sergio Del Pero, Manfredo Manfroi…; the Neorealists such as Luigi Crocenzi, Gianni Borghesan, Giuseppe Palazzi, and Pietro Donzelli; and other authors of the 1960s such as Carlo Cosulich, Uliano Lucas, Carla Cerati, Ezio Quiresi, Tullio Stravisi, Carlo Leidi, Toni Nicolini, and Ugo Mulas, who photographed Cinque Terre on behalf of Luigi Crocenzi, who had “scripted” the poetry of Eugenio Montale Meriggiar pallido e assorto… The 130 photographs of the exhibition come from the archives of the CRAF, from the Italian Turing Club, from the Circolo La Gondola of Venice, L’AM – Arte Mostre, Rome, and from private collections and from the Authors. The exhibition will be edited by Walter Liva.

The exhibition Italian Landscape in Photography will last until 23 May 2011. Considering that the Russian Museum is located a short walk from Italian Street, this may be a lovely journey into all sorts of Italian links in the Russian cultural capital.

The 150th Anniversary of Italy

I cannot imagine anyone who wouldn’t love Italy. If you don’t like its Etruscan, or Roman, or early medieval past, you may surely love the Italian Renaissance. Or you may love the Italian cinema, or Italian food, or Italian personality and way of life, or Italian fashion, or grappa and sunny seaside. Along with Greece, Italy is the cradle of the European culture, and as such, there is a place for Italy in everyone’s heart and mind.

Little do we know, perhaps, that until March 17, 1861 Italy was not a unified country. For the largest part of its history, Italy could be compared to a patchwork blanket: its many principalities, counties, and republics offered a rich variety of cultures, dialects, and a wide range of political alliances with ‘foreign’ countries. And even though the advocacy for the united Italy may be traced back as far as Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (1302-05), it literally took ages to transform an idea of the intellectuals into a people’s passion.

This was all to be changed in the 19th c. during the movement known as Il Risorgimento, headed by Giuseppe Garibaldi, in particular. The story rings some personal bells for me: when I was in my third year at the University, in my Modern History exam I had to talk exactly about the unification of Italy. Giuseppe Mazzini was another figurehead whose works I also had to read for the exam.And, of course, the first king of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II, and the prime minister, Camillo Benso, the countr of Cavour.

Il Corriere della Sera has created a special website celebrating the 150th anniversary – L’Unità d’Italia. The majority of information you are about to find there mostly illuminates the Italian culture. And below is a documentary by Alberto Melloni that traces the pivotal moments on the way to the modern “unique” Italian identity. A full article in Italian: «Va’ pensiero», Legnano, Pontida Quei simboli dell’Italia irredentista.

http://static2.video.corriereobjects.it/widget/swf/CorrierePolymediaShow.swf