Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
bours writing poetry in elegant Venetian-inflected Italian, including
Canzonette
(Songs)
and
Strambotti
(Ditties). Giorgio Baffo (1694-1768) was a friend of Casanova's whose
risqué odes to the posterior might have affected his political career elsewhere - but in
Venice, he became a state senator. To experience his bawdy poetry, head to Taverna da
Baffo, where his ribald rhymes may be chanted by night's end.
One of Italy's greatest poets, Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) studied in Padua and arrived in
Venice as a teenager amid political upheavals. Young Foscolo threw in his literary lot with
Napoleon in a 1797 ode to the general, hoping he would revive the Venetian Republic, and
even joined the French army. But Napoleon considered him a dangerous mind, and Fo-
scolo ended his days in exile in London.
Memoirs
Life on the lagoon has always been stranger than fiction, and Venetian memoirists were
early bestsellers. Venice-born Marco Polo (1254-1324) captured his adventures across
central Asia and China in memoirs entitled
Il Milione
(c 1299), as told to Rustichello da
Pisa. The topic achieved bestseller status even before the invention of the printing press,
each volume copied by hand. Some details were apparently embellished along the way,
but his tales of Kublai Khan's court remain riveting. In a more recent traveller's account,
Venezia, la Città Ritrovata
(Venice Rediscovered; 1998), Paolo Barbaro (b 1922) captures
his reverse culture shock upon returning to the lagoon city.
Memoirs with sex and scandal sold well in Venice. 'Honest courtesan' Veronica Franco
(1546-91) kissed and told in her bestselling memoir, but for sheer
braggadocio
it's hard
to top the memoirs of Casanova (1725-98). Francesco Gritti (1740-1811) parodied the
decadent Venetian aristocracy in vicious, delicious
Poesie in Dialetto Veneziano
(Poetry
in the Venetian Dialect) and satirised the Venetian fashion for memoirs with his exagger-
ated
My Story: The Memoirs of Signor Tommasino Written by Him, a Narcotic Work by
Dr Pifpuf.
Eighteenth-century Venetian grande dame Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi was practically wedded to her liter-
ary salon: when her husband received a post abroad, she got her marriage annulled to remain in Venice
and continue her discussions of poetry with the patronage of a new husband, her
cicisbeo
(manservant-lov-
er) in devoted attendance.
