Happy Birthday, Venezia
This will be quick: On March 25, Venice will begin what is planned to be a year-long celebration of its 1,600th birthday. (March 25, 421 AD was the beginning of Year One, according to later calculations. In any case, it was the laying of the first stone of the church of San Giacometo at Rialto.)
Strictly limited by pandemic restrictions, the festivities will begin at 11:00 AM on March 25 with a solemn mass in the basilica of San Marco celebrated by the Patriarch of Venice. My source says that you can watch this on the network Antenna 3 or on the Facebook page of Gente Veneta, a diocesan magazine.
That afternoon at 4:00 PM, all of the 130 churches in Venice will be ringing their bells. I don’t know if that will be broadcast. I’ll be outside with fingers in my ears.
In the evening at 6:30 PM on Rai 2 streaming, will be a concert from La Fenice entitled “Venezia 421-2021.”
I haven’t studied any further details, but for those who’d like to try to watch these two events, happy streaming. Note that until Saturday night, Venice is 5 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Daylight time (thus, 11:00 AM here is 6:00 AM in Bat Cave, North Carolina).
Meanwhile, some beauty to get you in the mood.
The Garden of the Forgotten Venetians: The Victory Column (Part 1)
This imposing pillar presides over the entrance to the Giardini, studded with curious protrusions. It’s big, it’s slightly forbidding, and although one can interpret certain components, the whole calls for some explanation. That’s my cue.
Part 1: The monument itself. Part 2: Some context on what it signifies. Be warned, there is a great deal of fascinating (to me) information ahead.
The column we see today is a trophy of the Italian victory in World War 1, installed here to honor the then-Royal Navy. It had been commissioned by the Austro-Hungarian navy in honor of Vice Admiral Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, and inaugurated on October 29, 1876. The column stood proudly in Pula (formerly Pola) Croatia, Austria’s primary military naval base in the Adriatic from 1853 until 1918, and a mere 84 miles (134 km) from Venice.
Following the defeat of Austria-Hungary on November 4, 1918, Italy occupied the Istrian peninsula, where Pula sits. In the grand tradition of victors, on February 1, 1919 admiral Umberto Cagni offered this bit of booty to someone on his side — specifically, the city of Genova, though this idea seems to have evaporated somehow. So the column was taken down and sent to Venice, a city which in any case had more shared history with Istria than Genova did. It was installed where we see it today, then modified in a few noteworthy ways.
As for why the column was designed this way, all the world knows that Pula is extremely famous for its many Roman relics, including one of the largest Roman amphitheatres still extant. Perhaps wishing to imply a connection between imperial Rome and Austria-Hungary, the creators of this monument may well have remembered the impressive column of Gaio Duilio.
Victory! It’s an event, obviously, but you might not have known that she was also a goddess, analogous to the Greek Nike. A major difference, however, was that while Nike represented victory and triumph, she did not grant victory, but only confirmed it by placing the laurel wreath on the victor’s head. She was depicted hovering over the winner of an athletic or poetry competition; the obverse of every Olympic medal bears Nike’s figure, with palm frond and laurel wreath. An altar and statue dedicated to Victory was placed in the Roman Senate by Augustus in 29 B.C. to commemorate the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. Defending this altar was the last great conflict between paganism and Christianity in Rome.
Winged figures representing victory, and referred to as “victories”, were common in Roman official iconography, and represented the spirit of victory rather than the goddess herself. They were depicted on silver coins of varying value, generally called vittoriato. After the Christianization of the Roman Empire they slowly were transformed into Christian angels.
Part 2 will relate a few of the Italian Navy’s feats in the Adriatic during World War 1, in order to clarify why this monument is somewhat more than just a towering granite cylinder.
Stumbling stones
It may seem that I have decided to dedicate my blog to war memorials (and it does begin to seem that way), but I promise I will be broadening the scope and lightening the atmosphere very soon. But not quite yet, because the other morning I joined a large group of people who came to witness the installation of a so-called “stumbling stone” (Stolperstein, in German; pietra d’inciampo in Italian). At the risk of appearing frivolous, let me mention that plenty of Venice’s masegni, or paving stones, are fully capable of tripping people up all by themselves. It happens every day. But these are different.
These “stones” are concrete cubes 10 cm (3.9 inches) on each side which bear a brass plate inscribed with the names of persons who were deported to the Nazi death camps; they are placed in the pavement in front of the house from which that person was taken (usually their home).
The majority of the victims were Jews, but you also risked deportation if you belonged to any of the following categories of non-ideal humans: Romani people, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, blacks, members of the Communist or Social Democratic parties or the anti-Nazi Resistance, the Christian opposition (Catholic and Protestant), Freemasons, military deserters, International Brigades soldiers from the Spanish Civil War, escape helpers, conscientious objectors, capitulators, “habitual criminals,” looters, persons charged with treason, military disobedience or undermining the Nazi military, as well as Allied soldiers.
German artist Gunter Demnig began this project in 1992 — he hand-makes each “stone” — and as of October 23, 2018 there were 70,000 in more than 1,200 towns and cities across Europe. The first 12 in Venice were put in place in 2014; the city now counts 78 (including the Lido and San Servolo). For anyone wishing to see any (or all) of the stones in Venice, here is a map.
But why set the memorial into the street? One would expect to see it discreetly placed on a wall, perhaps, but the setting deliberately recalls an anti-Semitic saying in Nazi Germany when someone tripped on a paving stone: “A Jew must be buried there.” Furthermore, as Nazis destroyed Jewish cemeteries they would break up the tombstones, using the pieces in the sidewalks where countless passing feet would desecrate them.
Giovanni Gervasoni was born into a modest Venetian family and studied to become an elementary school teacher. In 1930 he converted to Protestantism, joining the Waldensian Methodist community and working tirelessly in a group which distributed anti-Fascist publications.
Arrested as “a subversive” for the first time in 1932, he began a life of fleeing, hiding, and being under constant surveillance. “His political activity caused him to travel frequently between Venice and Padova,” recalled Alberto Bragaglia, a journalist and Waldensian, quoted in an article on nev.it. Bragaglia’s father, who was then an adolescent, told him that he remembered “a tall, lanky man who would suddenly appear at home and stayed as a guest for several periods of time.”
In 1935 he founded, with some men from the congregation, another group dedicated to the clandestine distribution of material from Giustizia e Liberta‘, an anti-Fascist Resistance group. Just a few months later, in April, he was arrested again and sent to the island of Ventotene, one of the regime’s best-known penal colonies for political prisoners. There he began, with fellow-prisoner Dr. Romola Quarzola, to try to secretly send anti-Fascist tracts to the mainland. Discovered, he was sent to prison in Rome and then Civitavecchia.
In December, 1938 he was sent to the island of Ponza, a prison island near Ventotene; after an extension of his sentence, he was finally liberated in July, 1943, the conclusion of eight years of incarceration. Undaunted, he returned to Venice and began to work as a partisan in collaboration with the Anglo-American forces. Arrested again on January 3, 1944, he was sent to Dachau and killed on February 17, 1945.
I hope this summary hasn’t bored you; I’ve given it to demonstrate the central point of all the thousands of “stones” across Europe. Gervasoni was only 36 when he died, having spent 15 years, roughly half his life, working against the Nazi-Fascist regime. What this small brass plaque represents, brightly and bravely, isn’t his death, but his life.
The Garden of the Forgotten Venetians: The Partisan (Part 1: The Statues)
(For some reason this post registers as having been published several days ago, but it has yet to appear in the world at large. Clearly it was intended to precede the post about the women themselves, but here we are. I am attempting to publish this now.)
Anyone who has walked through the Giardini has almost certainly seen this ruin. As much as any fragmented Greek temple or scattered Etruscan fort, this chunk of cement represents a number of stories: Political, social, artistic, all of which are, lest we forget, human.
The story of the now-invisible monument is made of people and events stretching from World War 2 till the 1960s; it concludes in 1969 with the addendum of the contorted, algae-covered bronze woman perpetually drowning in the water just beyond. The algae-covered woman is fairly easy to interpret, whether you happen to like her or not, but the mute chunk of cement just stands there like some prehistoric stele.
This post will be about the monuments, and the following post will be about who they represent, much of which has faded by now into the middle and far distance in the general memory (spoiler alert: They represent the Italian women who fought in the Resistance during World War 2).
Venice was occupied by the German army from September 8, 1943 till April 28, 1945; there were 17 Nazi command posts in the city. And, as in the rest of Italy, resistance movements flourished. There are plaques on a good many Venetian streets to the memory of male partisans who were caught and executed, victims of the “German lead” (bullets). But the dramatic and crucial participation of the women of the Veneto region is officially recognized only in the Giardini.
Let me say at the outset that I do not represent myself as an expert on Italian social and political evolution of any epoch; it is fiendishly complex, and what we don’t know will always be more than what we do. Added to this is the inevitable (I guess it’s inevitable) gloss of romance that is so easy to spread across the dauntless souls, men and women, who undertook terrifying risks and, when things went wrong, faced hideous torture and death.
The women who aided the Resistance in myriad ways worked — obviously — as secretly as possible, so it was a great thing when it was decided to commemorate their toil, resourcefulness, determination, and overall courage and grit. The result was a statue in painted majolica by sculptor Leoncillo Leonardi. This work was installed atop a cement pedestal designed by Carlo Scarpa, the renowned Venetian architect.
This statue had a fairly short life and, not unlike some of the women it celebrated, it met a violent end. On the night of July 27, 1961, a neo-fascist group set off a bomb that blew it to bits. The pedestal survived, though I don’t know if that was merely by chance.
The story begins in 1954, when the Institute for the History of the Resistance of the Three Venices (or Triveneto, the regions of Venezia Euganea, Venezia Giulia and Venezia Tridentina) decided to dedicate a memorial to all the women of the three regions who had participated in the Resistance, some of whom had also posthumously been awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valor for their actions and, too often, ultimate sacrifice.
The plan was to unveil the monument in 1955 to mark the tenth anniversary of the end of World War 2. This was to be the first monument in Italy, and in Europe, commemorating the women partisans. (There have since been a few others.) To appreciate this decision, one should know that after the war the women were typically described as having “contributed” to the partisan struggle, and not as active participants sharing the risks and hardships as much as the men. (See the following post.)
Leoncillo Leonardi was chosen for the commission, a sculptor and former partisan known for having already created monuments to other civilian victims of the Resistance. He chose to work in ceramic, his favorite medium, and the vividly-colored result did not meet with universal enthusiasm even though the neo-Cubist style was a nice poke in the eye to the Fascist government which had forbidden it.
After the 1.5 kilos of explosives (one source says dynamite, another says TNT) pulverized the statue, the enraged Venetians staged protests against what was universally seen as neo-Fascist aggression. What pieces remained were gathered up and dumped in a pile with other trash and detritus behind the city’s “Serra,” or greenhouse, which was itself neglected over time till it reached a state of impressive deterioration. The fate of the fragments was forgotten for some 50 years, but when the Serra underwent a major restoration a few years ago, the garbage collectors carting the debris away discovered the bits of the statue. The largest and most important piece was the chest and head of the woman (the majolica layer of the face had been obliterated by the blast), an arm with a hand, and a number of other pieces, though the lower part of the statue is essentially gone forever.
The concrete pedestal had been recovered (I lack details here) in 2003 and set upright again by Roberto Benvenuti, the supervising architect. My sources say that the pieces were given to a restorer to be reassembled in some way, but there the trail goes cold.
To return to 1961: In the aftermath of the attack, a new committee was formed to commission another statue. Why didn’t they just install the original red-kerchiefed woman? There seem to be two reasons. One, apparently nobody ever liked it. Down deep, people felt it was just too different — not so much for the militant character of the woman as for its exceptional modernity (read: Cubist colored clay is just too weird). It must have been a blow to Leoncillo, not only to see his statue exploded, but not to be asked to make a new one (he died in 1968, seven years after the event).
The second reason for a new work, however, appears to have been a radical change in viewpoint toward the women partisans themselves. Even as plaques and street-names in their honor were being put up around the Veneto, many of these women were no longer seen in their triumphant aspect. Reflecting this revision, the new statue (in more-traditional bronze instead of ceramic) would represent, not the resolute combatant, but the martyred victim. This new statue was as full of feeling as the first, but it was a different feeling, focused on sacrifice and suffering.
There were undoubtedly as many political as aesthetic reasons for this change, and I cannot plumb those depths here. I merely note, as one journalist put it, that by 1969 the city “preferred to convey a different image of the woman in war. What’s striking is the willingness to substitute for a strong image, alive, of a woman who reacts and resists, a more traditional one, of a woman defeated by war and not even easily identifiable as a partisan.” In the ten years separating the two statues, the image of the dynamic woman who fought had regressed, in a way, to that of the tragic woman who was courageous but who just “helped” the men.
The following post is dedicated to the women themselves.