Unusual Vicenza: Discovering the Magic

Venice does not need an introduction. Many tourists visiting Venice have also heard of Verona. However, very few persons visiting Venice and Verona know of Padova and Vicenza.

Vicenza is counted among the 4 beautiful cities in the Veneto region in north-east of Italy along with Venice, Padova and Verona. Each of these cities is a concentration of history, art and culture. At the same time, each of these cities is distinctive - Venice is the city of canals, Padova is the oldest European university and the city of the saints (St Anthony and St Justine), Verona is the city of Romeo and Juliet, while Vicenza is the city of the architect Andrea Palladio and is a World Heritage city for UNESCO.

This post is an introduction to Vicenza, which has a large number of buildings designed by Andrea Palladio, one of the most influential architects of recent history. For example, his little gem, Villa Rontonda (in the image above), has inspired many patrician houses around the world including the White House.

This post is also about unusual ways for discovering the city's magic, seen through my eyes of nostalgia and through the eyes of Chiara Pesavento, who is passionate about languages, history and culture of this city.

Vicenza of My Memories

I had come to Vicenza in 1979 and stayed for a period at the guesthouse of the Filippini Church along the city's central street called Corso Palladio. Listening from my room on the second floor to the concerts of organ music held in the church below, is one of my first memories of this city and of Italy. At that time I was not very familiar with the western classical music and I remember my shock when it had happened for the first time - I felt surrounded by the warm pulsating embrace of the music as it had filled my room, it was absolutely amazing. Probably the particular acoustics of that building had something to do with that experience.

"Ai Filippini" was a 2 minutes walk from the city's central square, Piazza dei Signori (Lords' Square), where I remember spending hours on the weakends, admiring the absolutely amazing Loggia del Capitanio and the imposing Basilica with its green domed roof. Both these buildings were the works of Andrea Palladio, though at that time I had no idea about who he was!

I loved sketching in those days and that had helped me to become familiar with different landmarks of the city including the incredible Olympic theatre, Chiericati Palace Museum, Montanari Palace and 2 wonderfully landscaped parks - Querini park and Salvi park. Another of my favourites memories is that of the climb to the Monte Berico church at the top of the hill overlooking the city. The image (above) presents one of my sketches of the Piazza dei Signori from those days.

When I look back, I feel that I was fortunate to have the introduction to the historical and cultural treasures of Italy through the unassuming and lesser-known Vicenza. Most tourists to Italy know of Rome, Florence, Pisa, Venice and Pompei. A few more discerning ones know about Bologna, Naples, Verona or 5 Terre. Relatively few think of visiting Padova or Vicenza. Knowing Italy through Vicenza has taught me about the joys of visiting smaller and relatively lesser known Italian towns to discover their hidden gems of history, art and culture.

Today, I live in Schio, a tiny town situated 20 km from Vicenza. Even Schio and many other smaller towns of the province of Vicenza, such as Thiene, Bassano del Grappa and Marostica, have so many historical, artistic and cultural sites to discover, that would be impossible to find in any other country! Anyway, enough about my memories of Vicenza - let me now give you a brief glimpse of the town through the eyes of Chiara Pesavento, who is more qualified to talk about it.

About Chiara Pesavento

Chiara Pesavento is a tourist guide in Vicenza, active in this role since 2006. Her decision to become a tourist guide can be traced to a visit to an art collection in Chiericati Palace Museum as a child, when she was struck by the description of a painting by the guide. "Suddenly that uninteresting piece of art acquired details and a depth of meaning" she explains, "and I knew that I wanted to be a tourist guide."

She also had a passion for learning languages (she speaks Spanish, French and English) and loves meeting persons from different countries. All these skills combined to create a person who is passionate about the history, art and culture of her town, and she loves to share these passions with people who come to visit Vicenza. For this post, I asked her to talk about some special thematic tours, which help in discovering lesser-known aspects of this city.

Unusual Vicenza

One of Chiara's favourite tours of Vicenza is called "The lost treasures". For this tour, she uses old city maps from '700 to visit and understand how the city has changed over the past centuries. It means going around to see buildings that are not there anymore and to hear about the history of what had happened and how the city had changed. This also helps in understanding the old toponomies of the town. For example, there were about 50 churches in Vicenza in late medieval period, out of which only 17 are still there today, while the remaining are lost. Many of these were lost during the occupation of the city by Napoleon Bonaparte. This tour lets you understand the impact of that occupation.

Another tour of the city is through its art collections. The art collection at Chiericati palace museum, the collection of 18th century Venetian art at Montanari palace, the sacred-art collection at the Diocesan museum and the different art works in the city churches - if you love art, there is so much to see and discover in Vicenza. For example, the St. Corona church has the altar and a painting by one of the famous Venetian artists, Giovanni Bellini.

About 500 years ago, Antonio Pigafetta, a writer, navigator and geography expert from Vicenza, had completed an around-the-world trip. To celebrate this event, together with her colleagues, Chiara proposes the "Pigafetta tours of Vicenza", to discover the Gothic town of the 15th century. It was a period when the town was recovering from the plague epidemic, agricultural crisis and famines. The tour allows the visitors to look at the buildings from that era and to understand the life of those times.

Chiara feels that there are many aspects of the city linked with its artisans and production systems, which are equally valuable to visit and to know better. For example, Vicenza has long traditions of wool and silk production since 15th century. It is also known for it goldsmith artisans. Another example is that of specialised printing such as the Busato artistic printing press specialised in chalcography (bronze plate engraving for printing), lithography (printing with stone or metal plate) and xylography (wood-block printing). She feels that tours to visit and see these artisans at work can be another interesting way to discover and understand the city.

Conclusions

With the Covid-19 epidemic, few persons are travelling around. However, hopefully soon this epidemic will be over and persons will start travelling and visiting other countries. Personally, I miss my travelling very much. However, not to be able to travel to far-away places has a positive side-effect - I can go back and rediscover my old favourite towns like Vicenza.

When travelling will become possible and you will plan a visit to Venice and surrounding cities, I suggest that you keep a few days to discover towns like Vicenza, Padova and Verona, and to visit the smaller provincial towns of Vicenza such as Schio, Bassano and Marostica.

If you want to contact Chiara Pesavento, you can check her website - Vicenza Tourist Guide.

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Snakes, Merchants & Emigrants - Gun Island

Finally, I have read Amitabh Ghosh’s latest book “Gun Island” (Penguin, 2019). This book can be looked at different levels – as the exploration of an old Bengali fable, as a modern fable on emigration, as a cry of alarm about the looming environmental catastrophe, as an understanding of ancient links between India and Venice/Venetian republic in northern Italy, as a book about books, and probably many more.

For me personally, this book’s theme has a special resonance because it touches on the worlds which I inhabit – that of India, from where I come, and of Venice, where I live; and those of emigrants and refugees, especially those coming here from the Indian subcontinent, with whom I identify and sometimes work as a volunteer.

At one level, I was a little disappointed while reading this book because it lacked the immersive imagined worlds which Ghosh can create with his words. It is a fable and thus, chance, destiny and miracles play a disproportionate role in moving and shaping the story and these elements do not need to be always plausible. At another level, I was fascinated by its complexity in bringing together so many themes, and now after finishing reading it, I keep on thinking about them and discovering new angles and inter-connections to them.

Themes of the Book

Its themes are like rivers, sometimes flowing in parallel, sometimes inter-mixing and sometimes changing their course as the story moves, from Sundarbans in India, to Venice and then finally to Sicily. Some of them take centre-stage for some time, only to go underground for long tracts, waiting for another opportunity to emerge. The book has a big canvass but most of the time, it skims on its surface and does not delve deeper.

The book is equally divided into 2 parts - the first part is based inIndia, in Kolkata and the second, in Italy and mostly in Venice.

Book summary: Dinanath Dutta or Dino, as his Italian friend Cinta (Giacinta) calls him, is a solitary ageing dealer of rare books from USA and is the narrator of the book. Back to his home-town Kolkata for a holiday, he encounters people from “The hungry Tide”, Ghosh’s book about river dolphins in Sundarbans, which had come out 16 years ago in 2004. Piya, the young Indo-American researcher working on the river-dolphins from that book, is now older but still single and the love-story between DN and Piya is a tiny river in the book, which emerges in the beginning and then disappears, only to re-emerge and conclude happily at the end.

Apart from “The hungry tide”, the book also makes some references to the slave trade ships and the ship-journeys of indentured workers from India, the subject of Ghosh’s recent Ibis trilogy, starting with “The Sea of Poppies”.

The book also makes different references to other authors and their books, especially to the literary world of Italian author Emilio Salgari, known for his books about exotic India of thugs, princesses and pirates, some of which were centred around Sundarbans and were used for creating some TV serials such as Sandokan in the 1970s. Today Salgari is not very popular among children in Italy, but his books were a major influence till about 30-40 years ago, in shaping popular ideas in about India.

The legend of “Banduki Saudagar” linked with a shrine in Sundarbans, is the seed of the book, which guides the whole story. It brings out surprising connections between India and the merchants of the Venetian republic in 17th-18th centuries. The same legend brings DN to Venice, the Banduki (gun) island, where he fortuitously meets the friends he had met in Sundarbans – Tipu, the son of the boatman from “The Hungry Tide” and Rafi, the son of the care-taker of the shrine in the Sundarbans, along with other emigrants from Bangladesh.

The final part of the book, where Ghosh gives a historical overview of peoples’ movements across the world, starting from the millions of persons from villages and towns taken by the colonial masters and transplanted in far-away lands, and links it with today’s emigrants who start similar life-threatening journeys in search for a better life, is my favourite part of this book. Let me quote a few brief passages from this part: 

Yet there was a vital difference – the system of indentured labour, like chattel slavery before it, had always been managed and controlled by European imperial powers. The coolies often had no idea of where they were going or of the conditions that awaited them there; nor did they know much about the laws and regulations that governed their destiny. ...But all of that was now completely reversed.Rafi, Tipu and their fellow migrants had launched their own journeys, just as I had, long before them; as with me, their travels had been enabled by their own networks, and they, like me, were completely conversant with the laws and regulations of the countries they were heading to. Instead, it was the countries of the West that now knew very little about the people who were flocking towards them. ...I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the overturning of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe.

Few Comments: Ghosh is very eloquent in this part in presenting today's emigration as a kind of retribution of the colonial plundering of the world. However, I am not sure if real-life works like that. Italy was not much of an imperial power, except for a brief spell in Abyssinia (today's Ethiopia-Eritrea). I believe that "Preservation of Whiteness" is not enough to explain the fear of immigrants among the young men in Italy as proposed by Ghosh in his book, it is much more complex and has also to do with religion, culture, language and social norms.

I also think that it is not the young men, as the main demographic group, who are afraid of emigrants. Young people mix much more with persons of other cultures. Instead, it is the older-age groups including the elderly persons, who are more afraid of emigrants and of the changing landscapes of their towns and squares. 

Different episodes of the book ask you to believe in supernatural forces shaping the world, including the old fable of Banduki Saudagar inter-mixed with the Manasa Devi legend from north-east of India. At times, I found that a bit jarring.

The final conclusion of the book seems to be written for a Hollywood film with an Ethiopian woman standing tall in a little boat full of a ragtag bunch of emigrants, lit by a green fluorescence, with dancing dolphins and whales and a sky full of thousands of migrating birds.

Thunderstorms, islands getting submerged in the sea, tropical spiders in Venetian homes and shipworms eating the wooden base on which Venice is standing, strange and extreme weather events including the high tides which drown Venice frequently, dying dolphins and whales, sea-monsters in the Venice lagoon, all make an appearance in the book to underline the dangers of climate change.

Other Aspects of Illegal Emigration

The book touches on some uncomfortable aspects of illegal emigration, including the links with different branches of mafia of different countries which controls this traffic, but mostly it glosses over these aspects. The network which facilitates this traffic and lures unsuspecting young men (and some women, mainly from Africa) full of dreams, who take loans and sell their properties, to embark on a journey that takes years of their lives, often including passages during which they are forced into slave labour or even sexual labour and sometimes ends in drugs, alcoholism or prisons, is seen only in brief glimpses.

"Without the guys from Bangladesh, Venice won’t survive, because they do everything which local Italians don’t do", the book explains. The other side of this story is that emigrants can be asked to work with one third of the minimum salary, without a proper social security cover and to do long shifts, all conditions which locals do not accept and emigrants are too weak to resist.

Often the families of these immigrants think that they are living in Europe and imagine the European lives they see on TV and films, and keep on asking for money and other things from their sons and brothers. A few of them do find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but for almost all of them, the dream of that pot of gold extracts a heavy price, as shown through the words of "Palash" in this book, who hides behind a pseudonym in the book:

It’s impossible for me to go back now. My family still does not know that I dropped out of university and am now scraping by on the streets. My parents would not be able to imagine that a son of theirs was doing that kind of work. They think I’m still a student going to lectures and writing papers, at my university. If I tell them the truth now I would have to admit that I had been lying all along; that they were right to tell me not to go abroad; that I had made a terrible mistake and would have done better to listen to their advice. I would have to acknowledge that in chasing a dream I destroyed my life.
There is another dimension of emigration which is mostly left untouched in the book – it is that of a conservative version of Islam among a percentage of emigrants and the backlash that it provokes, especially in small towns and communities in Europe and its perceived links with radical Islam. Ghosh touches on it only briefly through a clumsy air-travel scene, where DN's agitation due to vision of snakes and the accidental switching on of an “Allah” song sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan leads to panic among the passengers, thinking that he is a terrorist.

Conclusions

Quality of Story Telling in Gun Island: I think that this book Gun Island is substantially different from Ghosh’s earlier works. He has a way with his words, and this book also gives him plenty of opportunities to show-off those word-building skills, to weave unexpected inter-connections. However, that pleasure of reading is hampered by feelings of disbelief because of too many coincidences, convenient dreams and visions and some cheesy miracles which dot the whole book. While reading it, I wondered if he has become lazier as a writer or does he let himself be guided too much by his concerns and activism for the climate?

Books' Characters: Compared to his earlier books, especially the ones from the Ibis trilogy, which had a whole bunch of characters that I had liked, I did not find any such character in this book. For me, both DN and Piya were kind of colourless persons. Tipu and Rafi were a bit more alive, but were difficult to identify with. Even the character of Cinta was, at times, a bit of a caricature.

I know that Ghosh has been campaigning over the past few years for greater awareness and action on the issue of climate change. Even in this book, climate change is a key force shaping the events. Yet, I felt that by bringing in the fables, supernatural forces and miracles, he seems to be saying that we don’t need to worry about the climate change and the earth or the nature will do something to right this situation – I am not sure if he actually wanted to give this message.

To conclude, for me Ghosh is one of the best story-tellers of our times. With that kind of placement on a high pedestal, for me reading this book was not as fulfilling as his previous works.

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