Friday, 5th September, Sala Conferenze Stampa, Palazzo del Casinò, “L’Oréal Paris per il Cinema” award, set up by L’Oréal in partnership with the SNGCI and destined, in 2008, to a young Italian actress voted for by the public.  Friday, 5th September, Palazzo del Casinò, XIV Euro-Mediterranean Conference on Cinema, organised in cooperation with UNESCO and the European Parliament, dedicated to the subject Cinema: Collective Creativity in the New Media. UNESCO will award the Prix CICT-UNESCO “Enrico Fulchignoni” to coincide with the conference. Wednesday, 27th August – Saturday, 6th September, Digital Expo - Second Edition - A programme of workshops, events and screenings, with the participation of companies and experts operating in the field of digital media. Amongst other initiatives, the second edition of Digital Expo (www.digital-expo.it) will also host the 6th Forum of Digital Cinema, organised by the SMPTE in partnership with

 Wednesday, 27th August – Saturday, 6th September, first floor of the Palazzo del Cinema, “Bellissima e Mamma Roma, Due Film per Anna Magnani”, a photography exhibition created by La Biennale di Venezia and the Centro Cinema Città di Cesena, in cooperation with Annecy Cinéma Italien and the Emilia-Romagna regional council. An homage to Anna Magnani on the 100th anniversary of her birth, it will feature 50 black and white photos, taken by set photographers Paul Ronald (Bellissima) and Divo Cavicchioli (Mamma Roma). 

                               Gondola or rather an ark, or a chest, from ancient Greek etymon. Maybe a closed space, protected, within which few precious riches had been kept belonging to the first inhabitants of the lagoon. Since the most ancient times, this boat has been a key element that the life and survival of Venice depended on.

Each type of craft used to get built taking into account the need imposed by the structure of canals and their twisting and turnings, together with the dangers of shallow water. The absence of keel and rudder made the boats, from the flat bottom, able to be manoeuvred by the means of only one oar, by a boatman that stands up aft. This characteristic use of an oar belongs to so-called “voga alla veneta” (Venetian style rowing). This type of rowing is peculiar in all the Venetian boats, that can boast of having a very unique type of poppet called “forcola” (crutch) in Venetian. A “crutch” is made of one quarter of wood trunk, usually walnut, of about 60 cm in diameter. It’s got a very complex shape that varies depending on body characteristics and the rowing style of each rower.

And it’s only by fully making use if its shape that a gondolier, masterly manoeuvring the oar, manages to imprint any direction of motion to the gondola. The poppets get completely hand-built, carving renowned woods for their elasticity, with the help of tools that only expert artisans are capable of using.

They get used every day, by both the lovers of Venetian style rowing and as objects of typical Venetian handicraft to show off as a work of art. One poppet is actually exposed in New York in Metropolitan Museum! Builders of poppets are called “remeri” (oar-men) and in addition to these they also build oars, that Serenissima continued to request in huge quantities. There are by now very few in Venice who continue the tradition of this famous skill, amongst these: F. Furlanetto, S.Pastor and P. Brandolisio.

The greatness of Venice and its power have always been indissolubly linked to its maritime gift, therefore to the production of a considerable number of crafts that used to be accomplished in a core place for this activity; the Arsenal.

The Arsenal occupied a large area of Castello, and gave work to thousands of workers up to relatively recent times. In any case, there existed other small boatyards where boats used to be constructed; such yards were and still are called “squeri”.

In squeri there were the ‘masters of axe’ and the secrets of crafting wood and lustre of colours, of painting and decorative carving were handed down from father to son. In the construction of gondolas, particularly, 8 types of excellent wood get used: oak, cherry, larch, lime, walnut, mahogany and elm. Each one of these types of woods gets utilised for accomplishment of specific boat components, hand-carved using traditional tools: an axe, a plane, a saw and a hammer. The bilges of wooden panels are obtained naturally dampening and warming up the wood using fire. The line of the aft boat gets designed taking into account the owner’s weight and Veneto foot is still used for measures, being most suitable for the operation. A gondola has a curious shape of half moon, because only a small part of its hull rests on the water with the purpose of reducing friction. It’s inclined on the right-hand  side with regards to the surface of the water and gets maintained in equilibrium by an oar on the poppet and thanks to a gondolier who, from the other side, manages to manoeuvre it very skilfully.

Ancient gondolas used to be supplied with an arched covering, called “felze” (cabin) and decorated with precious fabrics and rugs. In order to avoid showing off of richness, the judges assigned the use of only one type of fabric for “felze”: a black woollen cloth called “rascia”.

The “squeraroli” (gondola makers) were part of the School of Art and Crafts and their seat was near the church of S. Trovaso, where still today there can be found one squero. At present, only few squeri have remained in activity: Tramontin, Coop. of S. Trovaso, in Dorsoduro, Crea and Dei Rossi on Giudecca.

                                                                  For the period 1 to 15 Setember, special price in charming apartment located in the centre of Venice:
7 nights/3-4 people:  1000 euros

An elegant, 60 squared-meter apartment, located on the first floor ( second floor American) in the Santa Croce neighborhood, Casa Sant’Agostin is close to both the Santa Lucia train station and Piazzale Roma bus station. The apartment is a 10 minute walk from the San Stae water boat stop and the gothic Frari Church. Recently restored, Casa Sant’Agostin is elegantly and comfortably furnished, creating a relaxing environment.The apartment consists of an indipendent entrance, a hallway that brings you into a spacious living room furnished with a sofa, television, table with chairs; fully equipped kitchen, master bedroom and bathroom with shower. The centrally located apartment is located near Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio, one of the oldest and most romantic squares in Venice. The square’s church is a true artistic gem, around which the community’s happy and peaceful life revolves; indifferent to the tourist masses. In just a few minutes you can reach the Cà Pesaro Museum ( 5 minutes), Campo San Polo, Campo dei Frari, the San Giovanni Evangelista Scuola, the San Rocco Scuola, the latter which often offers evening concerts.

There is a 2% credit card commission for payment of the deposit.

The above prices include all utilities, bed linens, towels, and the final cleaning of the property,(until 7 nights stay).

We invite you to view photos and descriptions of the apartments as well and our terms and conditions at our website, www.venice-holidays.com.

CHECK-IN is from 3:00pm to 8:00pm.
>From 8:00pm to 12:00 midnight there is an extra charge of 50 Euro. 
>From 12:00 midnight to 1:00am there is an extra charge of 70 Euro.
After 1:00am check-in is not guaranteed, but if it is possible the extra charge is 100 Euro.
THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS TO THIS POLICY.CHECK-OUT is by 10:00am.

                                                              Andrea Palladio was born in Padua on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, 1508. To celebrate this quincentenary, the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), are mounting a major exhibition. It will open in Vicenza, (palazzo Barbaran da Porto, 20 September 2008 – 6 January 2009), it will then move to London (Royal Academy of Arts, 31 January – 13 April 2009) and will close in the United States of America in Autumn 2009.
This exhibition will seek to use both traditional and innovative media through which to present the full range of the work of this exceptional architect and his legacy. It will place Palladio within his contemporary historical context and will explore aspects of Palladio’s work which have not been adequately presented before. It will include an extensive selection of original drawings, as well as relevant paintings, medals and coins, architectural fragments, sculpture and books and manuscripts. This material will be complemented be large-scale architectural models, video and interactive computer animation. The exhibition will present to the public a rounded, engaging and essentially new synthesis of what is known about Palladio’s life, architecture and influence.

The exhibition will be structured so as to present these three aspects of the architect:

1. The life of an architect
2. Making a new architecture
3. An eternal contemporary

The life of an architect

This section will present the stages of Palladio’s life chronologically, including along the time-line sub-sections illustrating general themes or particularly important episodes. Aspects of the historical and architectural context will be evoked by the works and objects exhibited when they became important for Palladio: thus his contact with Rome and modern Roman architects will appear when Palladio makes his first visits to the city.
Palladio’s life is an extraordinary one: his story – which he deliberately conceals in his book – is that of an extremely gifted skilled craftsman, who managed to “self-fashion” himself so as to become an architect, intellectual, friend of the great and the learned, and - long before his death - one of the most renowned architects in Italy and in Europe.
The biographical section will trace Palladio’s social and intellectual transformation with portraits, drawings, and key documents, and present material relating to those who most influenced him. It will show his relations with the nobility of Vicenza, who adopted him as “their” architect and his ever closer ties with the governing elite in Venice. Space will be given to an undiscussed aspect of Palladio: his dialogues at a distance, often mediated by his friend and patron Marcantonio Barbaro (ambassador in France, then for six years ambassador to the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul), with France, Spain, and with his great contemporary Sinan. Gulru Necipoglu has agreed to curate the important section on Palladio and Sinan.

Making a new architecture

While chronology and context will be amply respected and explored in the biographical introduction, in the section devoted to Palladio’s architecture, Palladio’s ideas and working procedures will be presented, not only through original drawings and objects, modern models and computer displays, but interactively, as with the Villa Game, developed for the Vicenza Villa exhibition of 2004.
This section will seek to give the public an immediate sense of why and how Palladio studied Roman antiquities and the book of Vitruvius; how he discussed with his patrons; how he designed his buildings.
Attention will also be given to the way in which Palladio invented or adapted structural solutions so as to obtain the formal and spatial effects which his architectural preferences called for, especially as regards vaults and roof trusses.

An eternal contemporary

Palladio has always been, for many successive generations of architects, a contemporary: his voice present and pertinent, not only through the original words of his book, but in translations in many languages. No other architect (till Le Corbusier) has spoken so clearly and compellingly, emphasising the unchanging truths of architecture, and effecting dramatic conversions to his way of designing, like that recorded by Giacomo Quarenghi in an autobiographical memoir.
There are so many architects and buildings influenced by Palladio, in many countries, that no general survey is likely to do justice to them all.
To present the character of Palladio’s influence the exhibition will concentrate on a small selection of examples. These will show how Palladio’s system of architecture was transportable to countries and contexts far from the Veneto, and easily adaptable. The ablest Palladians in fact were those who best understood that to enrich their own work with Palladio’s ideas meant to extend his method, adapting it to the needs of their own place and time, rather than building precise facsimiles of his works.
The architects who will be presented here are the two great masters of the “Vicenza school”: Palladio’s jealous Vicentine follower, the brilliant Vincenzo Scamozzi and his inventive English admirer Inigo Jones. Lord Burlington, who bought most of the surviving drawings, will be presented, above all in relation to Chiswick.
A great architect whose work Burlington deplored, but who nevertheless was often inspired by Palladio, Francesco Borromini, will also be included, though to date he has never been interpreted as an imitator of Palladio.
Jefferson’s house at Monticello will be presented. So too will be important masterpieces commissioned by Catherine the Great of Russia: Cameron’s neo-Palladian villa at Pavlosk; Quarenghi’s Academy of Sciences at St Petersburg, and his palace for Alexander at Tsarskoye Selo.
A concluding section will recall Le Corbusier’s interest in Palladio and the parallels between these two founders (and propagandists for) new architectures.
Leading specialists will be responsible for these sections on Palladianism.

                                                                                          It’s time for news on another important fest and this one is in my favorite country, the one which didn’t invent the noodle but is nonetheless famous for it, and that would be Italy. This year’s lineup looks pretty sweet, and unfortunately we can’t be there (but if someone would like to provide coverage for us please get in touch) but we can report. One of the biggest films in the competition portion of the lineup would be Aronofsky’s latest, the Rourke starring The Wrestler. I know most of us are huge fans of Aronofsky, so regardless of whether he is moving out of heavier genre fare I’m still excited to see what he’s got, and plus I’m a fan of the Mick. His next will be a remake of Robocop and while I’m no fan of the original, I’ll watch anything he makes. Next up there’s a heavy Asian presence in competition, with 2 anime films, Mamoru Oshii’s The Sky Crawlers and Hayao Miyazaki Ponyo on the Cliff. There’s also Takeshi Kitano’s Achilles and the Tortoise, a drama about a talentless artist and his long sufferign wife. Other films of note are Barbet Schroeder’s Inju and Nelson Yu Lik-wai’s Plastic City, a post-modern Asian mafia/gangster tale set in Sao Paolo, Brazil. We’ll be running down the whole lineup here shortly and will report on anything else interesting, but check it out for yourself after the break!

OPENING FILM
“Burn After Reading,” Joel and Ethan Cohen, (U.K., U.S.) out-of-competition.

COMPETITION
“The Wrestler,” Darren Aronofsky (U.S., France)
“The Burning Plain,” Guillermo Arriaga (U.S.)
“Il Papa di Giovanna,” Pupi Avati (Italy)
“Birdwatchers,” Marco Bechis (Italy)
“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow (U.S.)
“L’Autre,” Patrick Mario Bernard, Pierre Trividic (France)
“Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow (U.S.)
“Il Seme della discordia,” Pappi Corsicato (Italy)
“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme (U.S.)
“Teza,” Haile Gerima (Ethiopia, Germany, France)
“Paper Soldier,” Aleksey German Jr. (Russia)
“Sut,” Semih Kaplanoglu (Turkey, France, Germany)
“Achilles and the Tortoise,” Takeshi Kitano (Japan)
“Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea,” Hayao Miyazaki (Japan)
“Vegas: Based on a True Story,” Amir Naderi (U.S.)
“The Sky Crawlers,” Oshii Mamoru (Japan)
“Perfect Day,” Ferzan Ozpetek (Italy)
“Jerichow,” Christian Petzold (Germany)
“Inju, the Beast in the Shadows,” Barbet Schroeder (France)
“Nuit de Chien,” Werner Schroeter (France, Germany, Portugal)
“Inland,” Tariq Teguia (Algeria, France)
“Plastic City,” Yu Lik-wai (Brazil, China, Hong Kong/China, Japan)

OUT OF COMPETITION
“Puccini e la fanciulla,” Paolo Benvenuti (Italy)
“Yuppi Du,” Adriano Celentano (Italy)
“35 Rhums,” Claire Denis (France, Spain)
“Cry Me a River” (short), Jia Zhangke (China, Spain, France)
“Shirin,” Abbas Kiarostami (Iran)
“Tutto e musica” (1963), Domenico Modugno (Italy)
“Vicino al Colosseo…c’e Monti” (short), Mario Monicelli (Italy)
“Do Visivel ao Invisivel” (short), Manoel de Oliveira (Brazil, Portugal)
“Les Plages d’Agnes” (documentary), Agnes Varda (France)
“Vinyan,” Fabrice Du Welz (France, U.K., Belgium)
“Encarnacao do demonio,” Jose Mojica Marins (Brazil)
“Volare” (1959), Piero Tellini (Italy)

OUT OF COMPETITION — SPECIAL EVENTS
“Bajo el Signo de las Sombras” (documentary) (1984), Ferran Alberich (Spain)
“Vida en Sombras” (1947), Lorenzo Llbobet Gracia (Spain)
“Ketto Takadanobaba” (1937), Masahiro Makino, Hiroshi Inagaki (Japan)
“La Rabbia” (1963) (documentary), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italy)

IN COLLABORATION WITH UDINE FAR EAST FEST
“Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit!,” Minoru Kawasaki (Japan)
“Queens of Langkasuka,” Nonzee Nimibutr (Thailand)

HORIZONS
“Goodbye Solo,” Ramin Bahrani (U.S.)
“A Erva do Rato,” Julio Bressane, Rosa Dias (Brazil)
“Parc,” Arnaud des Pallieres (France)
“Melancholia,” Lav Diaz (Philippines)
“Un Lac,” Philippe Grandrieux (France)
“Wild Field,” Mikhail Kalatozishvili (Russia)
“Il Primo giorno d’inverno,” Mirko Locatelli (Italy)
“Voy a explotar,” Gerardo Naranjo (Mexico)
“Jay,” Francis Xavier Pasion (Philippines)
“Pa-ra-da,” Marco Pontecorvo (Italy, France, Romania)
“Zero Bridge,” Tariq Tapa (India, U.S.)
“Pusique nous sommes nes” (documentary), Jean-Pierre Duret, Andrea Santana (France, Brazil)
“Women” (documentary), Huang Wenhai, China, Switzerland
“In Paraguay” (documentary), Ross McElwee (U.S.)
“Z32” (documentary), Avi Mograbi (Israel, France)
“Below Sea Level” (documentary), Gianfranco Rosi (Italy, U.S.)
“Los Herederos” (documentary), Eugenio Polgovsky (Mexico)
“L’Exil et le royaume” (documentary), Andrei Schtakleff, Jonathan Le Fourn (France)

HORIZONS EVENTS
“Verso Est” (documentary), Laura Angiulli (Italy, Bosnia)
“ThyssenKrupp Blues” (documentary), Pietro Balla, Monica Repetto (Italy)
“La Fabbrica dei Tedeschi” (documentary), Mimmo Calopresti (Italy)
“Soltanto un nome nei titoli di testa” (documentary), Daniele Di Biasio (Italy)
“Antonioni su Antonioni” (documentary), Carlo di Carlo (Italy)
“Venezia ’68” (documentary), Antonello Sarno (Italy)
“Valentino: The Last Emperor” (documentary), Matt Tyrnauer (Italy)
CLOSING FILM
“Orfeo 9” (1973), Tito Schipa Jr. (Italy), out-of-competition

FOR RESERVE ONE APARTMENT FOR THIS TIME YOU CAN SEE OUR APARTMENTS IN WEB SITE:

www.venice-holidays.com
info@venice-holidays.com

                                                               LAST MINUTE for the month of August we can offer you apartments located in the centre of Venice at the special price:

4 nights / 4 people

- Angelo blue  apart. (San Marco  area)
http://www.venice-holidays.com/apartment.aspx?cat=&item=48
The price is :   950     euros - 

Angelo red   apart.(san Marco area)
http://www.venice-holidays.com/apartment.aspx?cat=&item=46
The price is:  950      euros-

Angelo yellow apart. (San Marco area)
http://www.venice-holidays.com/apartment.aspx?cat=&item=47
The price is :  950  euros

  - Cà Del Campiello ( Castello area )
http://www.tourist-flats.com/apartment.aspx?cat=&item=63
The price is:  650 euros

- Casanova 1 apart (Castello area) just 10 minutes walking distance to S.Marco
http://www.venice-holidays.com/apartment.aspx?cat=&item=32
The price is : 750  euros

 Casa Sant’Agostin ( San Polo area)
http://www.venice-holidays.com/apartment.aspx?cat=&item=44
The price is :  700     euros -   Ca D’Oro Holidays apart.( Cannaregio area)
http://www.venice-holidays.com/apartment.aspx?cat=&item=19
The price is :  700       euros

- Fenice apart. (San Marco area)
http://www.venice-holidays.com/apartment.aspx?cat=&item=36
The price is :  700       euros-