Look closely, and you will see depictions of the Annunciation everywhere in the city, most prominently as you go under the Rialto bridge - flanked on the one side by the Archangel Gabriel and on the other by the Virgin Annunciate.
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Venezia 1,600: a remarkable birthday celebration
Catherine Kovesi • Mar 25, 2021
25 March 2021 marks 1,600 years since the legendary foundation of the city of Venice. Catherine Kovesi reflects on this most remarkable of anniversaries.
Whilst many are justifiably celebrating the 25 March as DanteDì and are marking 2021 as the 700th anniversary of the great poet's death, there is another, far older, celebration underway on this day – the 1,600th birthday of the city of Venice.
Venetian chroniclers maintain that their city was formally founded on the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March 421CE, on which day began the building of the city’s oldest church,
San Giacomo di Rialto. The symbolism of the Annunciation was thereby seamlessly incorporated into the Myth of Venice – a city whose birth was in its own way an improbable miracle and whose citizens regarded the Virgin Mary as having a special protective role over their destiny.
My personal favourite is in the Scuola (Confraternity) of San Rocco in which Tintoretto (1518-1594) depicts Gabriel delivering his message at high speed with a swirling retinue of putti, to Mary’s evident astonishment (oil on canvas 545 x 422cm, 1582/87).
The Comune di Venezia has inaugurated
a series of events to celebrate this remarkable birthday, though sadly, under renewed lockdown, the birthday itself has been marked in the main by the release of several very beautiful videos which, in their views of a city denuded of tourists, serve to highlight the city’s fragile beauty.
During the city’s first lockdown in 2020, the media was full of the fake news of dolphins swimming in the Grand Canal. However two days ago, on International Water Day, two dolphins did indeed find their way into the Giudecca Canal to the enormous delight and amazement of Venetians. Many hoped that this was perhaps a sign of a new benediction on this most ancient and amphibious of cities.
Happy Birthday Venice.
Open until 14 April 2024, the exhibition Emerging From Darkness: Faith, Emotion and The Body in the Baroque is presented at Victoria's Hamilton Gallery (on the unceded lands of the Eastern Maar and Gunditjmara peoples), in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Unprecedented, and monumental in scope, Emerging From Darkness brings together an exceptional group of works from public and private collections in Australia. It was curated by Associate Professor David R. Marshall , Principal Fellow in Art History at the University of Melbourne, Dr Lisa Beaven , Adjunct Senior Research at La Trobe University, and Laurie Benson , Senior Curator of International Art at the NGV. Here two curators explain some of the project’s background and aims.
In Italy this year there has been no shortage of Manzoni celebrations, particularly in Milan . And in Australasia? Dr Stefano Bona , Lecturer in Italian Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide, on the lands of the Kauna nation, has lately been involved in creating a ‘special miniseries’ of radio programmes about Alessandro Manzoni. Now available for listening on demand are two longform interviews with Stefano Pratola at Radio Italiana 531 AM. Here Stefano Bona shares some background to this podcast project.
Announcing, with great pleasure, the winners of the 2023 ACIS Publication Prize for an established scholar, and the 2023 Jo-Anne Duggan Prize. ACIS awards both prizes every two years . In this case, each winning publication addresses the theme of mobility – a fast-evolving direction in Italian Studies research – and each brings forward a topic with clear contemporary significance.
The 12th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies will be held at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, from Wednesday 3 July to Saturday 6 July 2024. The conference theme is ‘Italian Studies for Global Challenges: Transdisciplinary Conversations’.
Open to postgraduate and early career researchers, since 2018 the ACIS Save Venice Fellowship programme has been enlivening close links between Australasia and the city of Venice. Fellowship applications were suspended in 2022, for pandemic-related reasons. So it is a special pleasure to announce that Brigette De Poi has been awarded an ACIS Save Venice Fellowship for 2023. Already living in Venice to focus on her PhD project, Brigette shares some first reflections on her contact with Save Venice thus far.
Which memories are allowed to circulate in a particular culture – and which are relegated or silenced? What political logic is at play when a certain way of remembering is spelt out, even imposed? Matthew Topp was awarded an ACIS Postgraduate Scholarship in 2020, to source archival records for his doctoral thesis, which has the working title ‘ Ars Oblivionalis : A Study of Cultural Forgetting in Renaissance Italy’. Now returned from fieldwork, he shares a brief account of his PhD project and travels.
Two promising early career scholars – Lauren Murphy and Julia Pelosi-Thorpe – were the recipients of ACIS Save Venice Fellowships. Delayed due to COVID travel restrictions, they were finally able to access their Fellowships in 2022. Here they both reflect on their time in Venice and the benefits of the Fellowship to their respective research projects.
ACIS is delighted to announce that Professor Andrea Rizzi has been appointed the new Chair of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies. He leads a renewed Management Committee with several new appointees who start their terms of office this year.
After a hiatus of three years due to travel restrictions, ACIS is delighted once again to be able to offer its Postgraduate Scholarships for Research in Italy. Two promising postgraduate students have been awarded scholarships in the current round: Brigette De Poi and Laura Di Blasi.