Venice, capital of printing
If you want to make a joke, you could say that Venice welcomed the birth of its first book even before applauding the birth of its first author. It's true that in the middle of the 15th century, the Serenissima was enjoying a period of prosperity, even allowing itself a few conquests. Two German brothers, Jean and Wendelin de Spire, took advantage of this period to request, and obtain, an immense privilege: the installation and monopoly of printing on the territory for a period of five years. Their first work, Cicero's Epistolae ad familiares, went to press in 1469, but Jean lost his life a few months later, while the second, Saint Augustine's La Cité de Dieu, did not have time to dry. His death put an end to the short-lived monopoly. At this point, the story diverges: competition or, on the contrary, the invaluable help of an apprentice who is suddenly gaining in stature, the fact remains that a new character appears alongside Wendelin: Nicolas Jenson. This Frenchman, most likely trained in Mainz by the very inventor of movable type, Gutenberg, once again printed De Evangelica preparatione by Eusebius of Caesarea in 1470. Contrary to what one might think, books were already benefiting from a buoyant market at the time, with occasional overproduction but also real outlets. Jenson took on all genres, from Greek and Latin classics to legal and medical pamphlets, and exported as far afield as Germany. After joining forces with Joannes de Colonia to create La Compagnia, it is said that their company, a veritable industry, produced almost half of Venice's books! After them came others, and in the 16thcentury the city remained the leading producer of printed works in Europe, but it was time to give way to literature.
On the side of literature
The truth is, few authors were born in Venice, but many drew inspiration from the city, some decided to settle here, others breathed their last. Such is the case of Pierre l'Arétin, born in Arezzo in 1492, who found refuge in the city of the Doges. Nicknamed "the Divine", he was a sulphurous man whose biting, sometimes crude satires made the elite shudder and the clerics tremble with rage. The victim of an assassination attempt, but only just scalded, he had his correspondence published in Venice, counting on certain gifts to spare those who could afford them his claws. Deserving of his new nickname "the scourge of princes", legend has it that he literally died of laughter at a final banquet at the age of 64. In addition to his witticisms, he left five comedies and erotic dialogues to posterity, to be discovered by Allia (La Vie des nonnes, La Vie des femmes mariées and La Vie des courtisanes). His contemporary, Angelo Beolco, better known by the name of one of his characters, Ruzzante, is a different breed altogether. History doesn't record his exact date and place of birth, but he was certainly born in Padua, a picturesque town some forty kilometers from Venice. The illegitimate son of a doctor, he received a good education and then became the protégé of Alvise Cornaro, a Venetian intellectual and nobleman who encouraged him to describe the peasant condition. Ruzzante did just that, and his plays earned him the title of the greatest Italian playwright of the 16th century, a title still held in high esteem today, since Dario Fo, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to Ruzzante in 1997, did not hesitate to place him on a par with Molière. Ruzzante was certainly an innovator, both in his art of blending languages and dialects, and in his ease in bringing the simplest of characters to the fore, for once, even though critics and the passage of time have sometimes forgotten him. The 17th century saw the birth of two Venetian authors who are also too little known: Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750) and Giorgio Baffo (1694-1768), who nonetheless enjoys a commemorative plaque embellished with an epitaph by Guillaume Apollinaire. The former co-founded the Giornale de'letterati d'Italia, published 20 volumes, was later imperial poet to the Viennese court, and still found time to write some sixty plays. The latter favored philosophy, and above all his love of women, which he did not hesitate to express, sometimes quite explicitly, in his sonnets. Clearly, Venice had already earned its reputation as an aphrodisiac city, yet it was through tragedy that Goldoni (1707-1793) entered the scene, even though he had honed his pen as a teenager by writing a satyric poem that led to his dismissal from the rather austere law school his family had urged him to attend. Soon, however, naturalness took over, and the undisputed master of modern Italian comedy indulged his penchant for antics, without neglecting a real social realism that drew the wrath of his peers. Tired of polemics, Carlo Goldoni ended his life in Paris, where he directed the Théâtre-Italien for a time. It was poverty that rewarded a career devoted to his passion, the reformer who knew how to free himself from the codes of commedia dell'arte and who used three languages - Italian, Venetian dialect and French - to put his dazzling ideas into words. It's a great honor that his plays are still performed today. Of the hundred or so he wrote, we'd particularly like to mention Arlequin serviteur de deux maîtres and La Locandiera, both of which are available from Garnier-Flammarion. Some of his work can also be found in the Pléiade (Gallimard), and the curious should not hesitate to purchase Les Mémoires de M. Goldoni pour servir à l'histoire de sa vie et à celle de son théâtre, published by Mercure de France (collection Le Temps retrouvé). Other memoirs, other atmosphere. L'Histoire de ma vie (The Story of My Life ) by Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725-1798), whose patronymic has become a common name that is readily pronounced with the hint of a smile, is, although written in French, also a landmark of Venetian literature, the man who lied about many things but never denied his native city. Published posthumously, blacklisted and available under the table in doctored versions, it would be reductive to consider this work as nothing more than a list of female conquests, some of them quite young, when it is also a testimony to a bygone era and to those circles where it was fashionable to use the language of Paris. The life of this manuscript has been as whimsical as that of its author, and would merit an autobiography in its own right, as both remain curiosities that still stir passions and attract suspicion. In spite of everything, if we are to believe the flagship novel by Ugo Foscolo, born in 1778 on the island of Zakynthos, the period is rather devoted to Romanticism, but this would be to deny that in Italy, as elsewhere, authors occasionally wear masks. The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis has an air that would almost bring it closer to Goethe's Sufferings of Young Werther, about a love so unhappy that it drives to suicide the man whose heart has been broken by a young woman destined for another. If Foscolo's story is based on a true story of a young student who took his own life in Pavia, how can we fail to make a double reading of it in the light of the journey of the writer who, for a long time and in vain, placed his hopes in Napoleon Bonaparte, believing that he would liberate his city? Whatever the case, and whatever the lesson to be learned from it, this epistolary novel, increasingly difficult to find in French, stands out for its melancholy inspiration and classical form. Equally hard to find, as Editions Ombres have a knack for unearthing rare and precious texts, L'Anti aphrodisiaque pour l'amour platonique is an exquisite amuse-bouche for anyone wishing to discover Ippolito Nievo. Born in Padua in November 1831, this sometimes prickly romantic suffered the tragic fate of those sometimes touched by a certain grace, as he drowned in the Mediterranean before his thirtieth birthday. His masterpiece, Les Confessions d'un Italien, was published posthumously in 1867 and can be read today by Fayard. This young writer is tackling a major undertaking, recounting the greatness and then the decline of Venice through the eyes of an old man, in several hundred pages that are both enjoyable and well-worth the effort, given the lively style and numerous twists and turns, but which teach the reader as much as the most exciting history book.
Modern times
Dino Buzzati was born in Belluno, Veneto, in October 1906. After abandoning law in favor of journalism, he pursued a career in journalism until the end of his life. Perhaps it's the combination of his realistic style and his often dreamlike themes, mixed with Kafkaesque and Surrealist influences, that gives his works their very personal touch? Of course, Le Désert des Tartares (1940), a tale of interminable waiting, should be read, and his most famous collection of short stories, Le K, should be kept as close to home as possible. Ugo Eugenio Prat, born in 1927 and better known by his pseudonym Hugo Pratt, spent part of his childhood in Venice, and although he was not born there, the city, along with his many family origins, undoubtedly illuminated his imagination. As a child, it was thanks to American comics that he was able to escape, so much so that after the war, he joined forces with two Venetians, Mario Faustinelli and Alberto Ongaro, who asked him to take part in the creation of adventures for masked Mexican heroes. L'As de pique (The Ace of Spades) became a household name, even in Argentina, where Hugo Pratt was a regular visitor. From chance encounters to collaborations and travels, in 1967 he wrote and drew The Ballad of the Salty Sea, a multi-episode adventure that appeared in a brand-new periodical, Sgt. Kirk. One of his secondary characters is named Corto Maltese. A few adventures later, and this time in Paris, it's Pif Gadget that welcomes the Maltese sailor, the man with the earring whose name has become so familiar to us. As is sometimes the case in comics, the character outlived his creator, and although Hugo Pratt died in Switzerland in 1995, his hero continues his adventures, to be discovered by Casterman, under the pen and pencil of two Spaniards, Juan Diaz Canales and Ruben Pellejero.
