Ca’ Centanni. The BuildingJe suis né à Venise, l’an 1707, dans une grande et belle maison, située entre le pont de Nomboli et celui de donna onesta, au coin del rue de Ca’ Centanni, sur le paroisse de St. Thomas [I was born in Venice, in 1707, in a large and beautiful house situated between the Ponte dei Nomboli and the Ponte della Donna Onesta, at the corner of Calle di Ca’ Centanni, in the parish of San Tomà].
This is how the eighty-year-old Carlo Goldoni, by then a resident in Paris for twenty-five years, recalls where he was born at the opening of his Mémoires. Ca’ Centani, or Centanni - now better known as Casa di Carlo Goldoni - was built in the fifteenth century and has maintained all the features of Venetian Gothic architecture of that period. The particularly interesting aspects of the building are the three-part canal facade with its richly-decorated four-arched window, and the entrance giving onto Calle dei Nomboli, which leads into an atmospheric courtyard with an external two-flight staircase bound by a banister in small columns of Istrian stone.
Initially owned by the Rizzo family, the palazzo was rented to the Centanni family and became the centre of a very active artistic/literary Accademia in the 16th cent. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, Carlo Alessandro Goldoni - the playwright’s paternal grandfather and a notary from Modena - took up residence here. As mentioned above, Carlo Goldoni himself was born here in 1707 (25 February), and the building would remain the family home until 1719.
In 1914 Aldo Ravà, a noted scholar of eighteenth-century Venice - together with Count Piero Foscari and Commendatore Antonio Pellegrini - bought the palazzo from its owner, Contessa Ida Manassero Camozzo, with the idea of using it to house a museum dedicated to the great playwright and to the history of Italian theatre. The project came to nothing because of the outbreak of war, and then in 1931 Ca’ Centanni was donated to the City Council to be restored and - with a slight variation on the original scheme - turned into a Goldoni museum and a study centre for matters relating to theatre. Again, war held up the work, which was only completed in 1953, with the public opening in June of that year. The building housed a small museum of Goldoni memorabilia and artefacts relating to Venetian theatre, but focused primarily on its role as a study centre, with constant additions to its library and archive.The Salon: Goldoni on Stage
Carlo Goldoni’s plays were a sharp and accurate reflection of the world of eighteenth-century Venice.
His numerous works - many of which are still performed throughout the world - made the city into a sort of observatory in which to investigate all the various aspects of the changing world of his age: cultural development and social conflict; the gradual emancipation of women; the emergence of characters who had never before been represented on the stage.
The first - and main - room of the museum skilfully conjures up the atmosphere of that world. On the walls are various enlargements of the engraved illustrations which figure in the last complete edition of Goldoni’s works published in the eighteenth-century (by Zatta in Venice, 1788-1795). These images are a free interpretation of the main themes around which Goldoni’s plays are constructed: masked figures and individual characters; the world of women; comic theatre; travellers and adventurers; the family on stage; noblemen, merchants and plebeians. Each of these various “sections” is illustrated in such a way as to bring out the main critical ideas within the plays Goldoni produced in a Venice that was still at the forefront of European theatre.
Various period objects are used alongside these enlarged illustrations to give a more tangible notion of the era depicted.
At the end of the room is a raised podium which in the future may be used for play-readings, conferences, etc., but at the moment holds a high-definition TV showing the DVD of A Venetian’s World and Theatre (also available in French and English), which combines images and a historical/critical account of Goldoni’s life in a very atmospheric study of the playwright’s world. Goldoni’s Life and Work
The room contains various portraits of the playwright - from the earliest, the anonymous engraving that figures on the flyleaf to vol. I of the Bettinelli edition of his works (Venice, 17550), to some of the more famous ones that would be produced during the course of his career (the double version of the engravings by Marco Pitteri based on the Giambattista Piazzetta drawing - showing Goldoni either in a wig or wearing a beret - the oil painting by Alessandro Longhi and that other portrait, long erroneously attributed to Longhi, which bears the inscription Doctor Carolus Goldoni Poeta Comicus). However, the playwright’s appearance - or the various “faces” to be associated with the different periods in his erratic existence - are perhaps more precisely caught by the enlargements of the engravings that figure as the frontispieces to each volume of the Pasquali edition of his works (Venice, 1761-1780), which depict significant episodes in his life, as recounted in the prefaces (unfortuntately the edition stops at Volume XVII, so we only have “illustrations” that go from his childhood up to 1743). The engravings were produced by Antonio Baratti (with the exception of two by Marco Sebastiano Giampiccoli) after drawings by Pierantonio Novelli; they are framed by a “stage curtain” with allegorical figures and stand upon a scroll with Latin inscriptions.
In the reproductions here, each image is accompanied by the author’s own original comments and by supplementary comments to put the event in context; the whole story reveals just how incident-full the development of Goldoni as a “scrittor di commedie” would be. A far-from exemplary student, an apprentice physician, a public official, a consul, and then a lawyer, only at forty years old would he dedicate himself exclusively to the profession of playwright. Up to this point, his passion for the theatre would seem to play only a minor part in what was an adventurous and unsettled life , which in many ways might be compared with that of Goldoni’s own character L’Avventuriere Onorato (one of his most autobiographical of plays).
A further panel narrates Goldoni’s adventures as a playwright, highlighting all the key moments - from the controversial successes on the Venetian and Italian stage to the exhilarating triumph in Paris, and thence to the bitter disenchantment with which he abandons the life of the theatre to capture his life in the pages of his Mémoires.
At the centre of the room, the table-top bears a reproduction of the 1729 topographical map of Venice by Lodovico Ughi, which gives the most detailed account of the layout of the city in the eighteenth century. The various homes inhabited by Goldoni are marked (they were identified as the result of research linked with the modernisation of this museum), as are all the numerous buildings which housed theatres, making eighteenth-century Venice the capital of the dramatic arts in Europe.
The variegated life of the city and streets charted by Ughi was, of course, captured in Goldoni’s own works, but here a further - rather more schematic - idea of the city of the time is given by the various paintings which hang on the end wall (most of them of the Longhi school). These include Il Concerto, Il Ballo, La Colazione in Villa, and La Cucina.
Finally, the intensity of contemporary interest in theatre is illustrated by the more famous eighteenth-century editions of Goldoni’s works (veritable best-sellers in the second half of the century). There is also the manuscript of the play Giustino - a tragi-comedy written at the very beginning of Goldoni’s association with the Teatro di San Samuele (and by a curious twist of fate the only script of his vast output to have survived in his own hand).
The Puppet theatre
In his Memoirs, Carlo Goldoni refers to the puppet theatre which his father Giulio had built for him in this very house as a “delightful entertainment”. And even if the association of the present puppet theatre with the playwright is purely imaginary, there is a certain “symbolic” truth in having such a period piece in the palazzo where the young Carlo Goldoni grew up.
What is more, puppet theatres in eighteenth-century Venice were opportunities for the young to practise their skills in the literary and musical fields, providing a charming domestic substitute for public theatre houses. They were also a sort of “chamber theatre” that stood in contrast to the “outdoor theatre” of the burattini (a sort of Punch and Judy show which was much more plebeian in tone and built around a few crude characters; as one can see from various paintings by Longhi, Canaletto, Bellotto and Carlevarijs, there were numerous such casotti - Punch and Judy stands - in the campi and streets of eighteenth-century Venice).
Budding playwrights could, in the comfort of their own home, invent intermezzi giocosi, fables, fairytales, stories of monsters and versions of classical myths, whilst amateur musicians could work on their own virtuoso scores for this “minor” art form.
Like the original proscenium arch, the eighteenth-century puppets on display here come from the collections of the puppet theatre of Palazzo Grimani (in the Cannaregio area, not far from the church of the Servite friars). They bear witness to the skill of Venetian craftsmen in this art form, with a refined and ingenious imitation of the real world (one only has to note the richness of the clothes, all carefully cut and made of the most precious fabrics). And the range of characters is a faithful reflection of the cosmopolitan life of eighteenth-century Venice, comprising as it does noblemen and servants, figures from the Commedia dell’Arte, ladies, servant girls, knights, Turks and soldiers.
Completely restored, the puppet theatre itself can now be used for actual performances.
Alongside, are special showcases containing other puppets, in which one can examine more closely the fineness of the detail and the extraordinary engineering skill that went into the mechanisms that operated them.
On the wall opposite is Il Parlatorio, an eighteenth-century painting in a vaguely Longhi-esque style, which has been chosen for this room because the lower left-hand corner shows a child playing on the floor with his puppets. The side walls have enlargements of details from famous Pietro Longhi paintings. The artist and the playwright were bound not only be a certain similarity of sensibility and subject-matter, but also by great mutual esteem: in a 1750 sonnet dedicated to the painter - written in the same year that the playwright took the most crucial steps in his “reform” of Venetian theatre - Goldoni opens with: “ Longhi, whose Muse is sister to mine /As you search for the truth with your paintbrush..” And seven years later- in the dedication of Il Frappatore to Marco Pitteri - he recalls “our mutual friend, the famous Pietro Longhi, painter, a great and most individual imitator of Nature, who through his rediscovery of an original way of expressing men’s passions and characters in paint, has greatly added to the glories of the Art of Painting.” These words are significantly similarly to those Voltaire would use in 1760 to celebrate the excellence of Goldoni’s theatre. “His writings to be judged by Reason/ Nature was taken as arbiter of the question//. To the critic, to the jealous man/Nature, bound to the real, said:/ Every writer falls short /But Goldoni painted me as I am.”
We would like to offer daily excursions on a luxury sailboat for up to 10 people.
The current stone bridge was originally built in 1580, and replaced the former three-aeched wooden drawbridge ( built in 1285 under Doge Dandolo). An inscription on the pilaster on the Cannaregio side of the bridge is datated 1580, and states: ” MARCUS BRIZIEN-SIS-INGENIARIS OFII PROVISORI-COMUNIS”). The parish priest Salvadori asked Contini to build the new bridge. It was restored in 1641, in 1777 and just recently, when special steps were added for the physically disabled. It takes its name from the canal, which is the largest and most important of those linking the Grand Canal with the lagoon. Its alternative name, “delle Guglie” “or of the Spiers”, derives from the four obelisks placed at the ends of the railing.
Every year TGS Eurogroup organizes “Su e Zo per i Ponti”, a non competitive walk for everybody: young and old, school parties, families…
