14th -24th February 2009

Saturday 15th February 2009 – h. 12.00 a.m. St. Mark, The Flight of the Angel. One of the most  appreciated events of the Carnival, an ancient tradition that will show a guest-star flying down from the Belfry tower to the ground in St. Mark’s Square.

ALL MUSIC TV Show – from Thursday 19th to Tuesday 24th h. 3.00 p.m., Campo S. Margherita
Opening Party – Saturday 14th February, from h. 11.00 p.m., Stazione Marittima
Music Party – from Thursday 19th to Tuesday 24th from h. 11.00 p.m., Stazione Marittima.
Medieval and Seventeenth century acoustic music sessions from Thursday 19th to Tuesday 24th from h. 9.00 p.m., Campo San Barnaba.
Dorsoduro will hold the music initiatives and sound installations of Sensation 2009. A permanent afternoon show organized by ALL MUSIC is located in Campo Santa Margherita, whereas the Stazione Marittima will be the heart of night-time entertainment and music. Medieval and Seventeenth century acoustic music sessions will take place in Campo San Barnaba.

From Thursday 19th to Tuesday 24th from h. 3.00 p.m., Campo San Polo. From Thursday 19th to Tuesday 24th from h. 9.00 p.m., Campo Bella Vienna.
San Polo, the sense of ‘Sight’ for children and young people. Campo San Polo and Campo Bella Vienna will be the focus points of the district. The first one will still be the Carnival place par excellence dedicated to children, with illuminations, mask workshops and the presence of amusing performers all round the square. Bella Vienna will come alive at sunset, with soft music, LED installations or light shows: evenings during which the ‘Sight’ is the sense that beats time.

From Thursday 19th to Tuesday 24th all day District of Cannaregio.
Cannaregio the kingdom of Taste. Various and entertaining gastronomic delights strolls giving a spectacular nature to the appetising side of Carnival. A location and a specially designed show, great chefs who will put on a spectacular culinary show, giving away their secrets too, while, when walking along Cannaregio you will see food sculptures and chocolate artworks. Besides, a fixed emplacement of a highly specialised network will inform visitors about the day-to-day activities taking place in the district.

From Thursday 19th to Tuesday 24th from h. 3.00 p.m., District of S. Croce.
Santa Croce and the sense of ‘Smell’. You will really be able to smell Santa Croce in 2009, thanks to a range of new installations and initiatives. A vast street theatre show based on smell will pay homage to this sense thanks to the use of special effects such as the Odorama. Small and precious performances scattered all over the district and based just on the stimulation of smell, making the promenade along Santa Croce a real sensory experience.

Sunday 22nd February, from h. 12.00 a.m., Ferretto Square, Mestre.
The flight of the Donkey
A guest-star will pretend to be the 2009 Carnival edition, by flying down from the municipal tower to the ground. Real donkeys will fill the centre of the town, bringing the astonishment, surprise and joy that represent Carnival.

Friday 20th February, h. 9.00 p.m. St. Mark’s Square: Drag Queen Beauty Pageant. The most beautiful Drag Queens will arrive in Venice from all over Europe.

The most beautiful costume of Carnival 2009. Contest and Award Ceremony: Sunday 22nd February h. 3.00 p.m. St. Mark’s Square.
A parade of competing masks, strange costumes, taste and originality will characterize the new richer and richer contest of 2009. The competitors and their creations will be judged by a prestigious jury of costume experts. Selections: Friday 20th and Saturday 21st February h. 3.00 p.m. St. Mark’s Square.

  Professional troupes were formed, with regard to the contemporary needs, under protection of northitalian courts in Modena, Mantov, Parma, where the ancestry of Geste, Gonzaga-Nevers, Farnese were traditionally suporting theater.And, above all, in the free atmospere of Venice. The new form of the theater gradually expelled other Italian comedy genres. Even editing a big quantity of bookish comedies did not changed this reality.The novelty of the comedy dell’arte consisted in a profesional organisation, in an accession of women – actresses and, above all, in the way of performing. Meeting of Lombardic troupes with fair performers in vivacious and noisy Neapol had a big influence on this.In the 17th century, the comedy dell’arte was a center not just a theater life, but also a social life.

Stable-base, fixed types (tipi fisis) are one of the specific components of the comedy dell’arte. In the expert terminology, they are called masks (maschere), even if a personage does not use a face mask. Grotesque types show, in caricatured exaggeration, a human attribute, psychical or physical or a combination of both. In the theater, there grew up a range of types observed in real life but also those created by an imagination and without a direct connection with life and era. While creating these types, a decisive factor is a class position of an author and a structure of an audience to which the play is dedicated.

Components of the commedia dell’arte

One of the perceptions from the process of acquainting with the comedy dell’arte is the idea that a performance of the comedy dell’arte was mostly a pantomimic or ballet piece. (This perception arose probably in the 19th century in England, France and Denmark when some comedians played a pantomimic performances with the figures of the comedy dell’arte and used their names without a direct connection.) In reality, performances were lively motional and rich in rapid speech, in plays on words and various phrases.The real comedy dell’arte has a few unseparable components that frame a conclusive complex.

Improvisation was a very important and attractive component. However, for it’s volatileness there are just a few co-temporary mentions of it.

Lazzi – the word itself provokes a joyful, comic reaction of an audience. The origin of the word lazzi (a singular in Italian is lazzo) is not clear. In the clear form it means a stage trick, a gag, a short joke, a mim’s scene, sometimes just and idea etc. There are two kinds of lazzi – a spoken one and a played one. Lazzi became an important element of comedy dell’arte, a flash point of a stage performance. Moreover, actors had a chance to make a show of their knowledge of literature. There are preserved compilations of various comic ideas, sentences, aphorisms, long equivoques, and also lyrical professions of love, disillusions or love jag. Actors were reading a lot and picking out quotations for their handbooks for the practices. The collection was accumulating and descended in actor’s families from generation to generation.

Speech was an integral ingredient of a play. From the early stage of the theater there are convincing confirmations of this fact.Venetian masks In the theater dell’arte, dialects are of a big importance. They guaranteed a popularity. Though other components of the comedy were liberating, dialects (in Italy) were remaining and became a continual connecting link with a plebeian environment. Many comic situations rose from using dialects that differ from each other - conversings understand each other badly or not at all.

            
Painting exhibition on Canaletto in Treviso at Ca dei Carraresi is called Canaletto, Venezia e i suoi splendori, it is a event set up by Fondazione Cassamarca under the aegis of the Municipality, Province and Region of Veneto.
               
               
 
This exhibition on Canaletto and the Venetian Vedutisti in Treviso is one of a kind. 
Archive photo 
 
This art exhibition on Canaletto in Treviso resumes series of art events begun on 2004 with Ottocento Veneto. Il trionfo del colore and then gone on with Venezia ‘900: da Boccioni a Vedova on 2006, all art exhibitions on Venetian painting.
 
Painting exhibition on Canaletto in Treviso at Ca dei Carraresi isn’t only a show on Canaletto in Treviso, but is is an exhaustive collection either for value or for amount of paintings made by also other eighteenth-century Venetian painters as Luca Carlevarijs, Michele Marieschi, Bernardo Bellotto and Francesco Guardi.
 
               
 
The works of eighteenth-century Venetian painters showed at Ca dei Carraresi in Treviso will be more a hundred, approximately thirty paintings were made by Canaletto and the others were made by other eighteenth-century Venetian painters.
 

Archive photo  Painting exhibition on Canaletto in Treviso at Ca dei Carraresi is an important event from artistic viewpoint because an exhibition on Venetian Vedutisti was set up at Palazzo Ducale in Venice only on 1967 and then similar exhibitions for importance were organized no more.
 
Among the several works at the exhibition Canaletto Venezia e i suoi splendori in Treviso there are two very important paintings by Canaletto coming from Russia: Ingresso solenne del conte di Gergy a Palazzo Ducale from Hermitage in St Petersburg and Il ritorno del Bucintoro from Puskin Museum in Moscow.
 
The first of these two works was in the list of painting to show at the exhibition on 1967, but it never arrived at Venice.
 
 
There will be other paintings coming from Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, from English National Trust, from Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, from National Gallery in London and from many other foreign bodies besides these works.
 
Painting exhibition on Canaletto in Treviso at Ca dei Carraresi will open on October 23rd, 2008 and it will close on April 5th, 2009.
               
               
 
OPENING TIMES OF THE SHOW ON CANALETTO IN TREVISO AT CA DEI CARRARESI
               
- Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday: from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.;
- Friday, Saturday and Sunday: from 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.;
- Monday: closed; except Monday 8th December 2008
- Extraordinary closing dates: December, 24th, 25th and 31st, 2008 and January 1st, 2009
               
 
Tickets for the painting exhibition on Canaletto in Treviso at Ca dei Carraresi:
- full price: € 12,00 (with headsets);
- reduced-rate ticket: € 9,00 per students, groups and persons over sixty years.

More information: Phone: +39 0422 513150
 

 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.

This is an extraordinary regatta with costumes celebrated on Epiphany day along the Grand Canal. A fun regatta among old members of the oldest Venetian rowing society, the Bucintoro. Fifty men dressed as “Befane” challenge each other on the main part of the Grand Canal from S. Tomà up to Rialto Bridge. Arrival of the Befane is represented by a gigantic sock hung over the Rialto bridge for the occasion. The Befana is one of the most popular traditions of the Italian collective consciousness. Her legend dates back to pre-Christian times. Nowadays, in the popular Christian culture, the Befana brings presents as a reminder of those given to Baby Jesus by the Magi. This very charming old lady flies on a broom bringing a bag stuffed with gifts on the night between the fifth and sixth of January. Then, sliding down the houses chimneys, she stuffs the socks left hanging by the children. When: January 6, time: 11am Where: in the Grand Canal. Departure from Palazzo Balbi in San Tomà and arrival in Rialto.

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