Jacobo de Barbari's Map of Venice, 1500

Amazing map, with extraordinary detail, and quite accurate.

Saint Mark's Square

The Arsenal

More. Large version here.

Roger Crowley, "City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas"

Tintoretto, The Capture of Constantinople, 1580

This is a history, not of Venice, but of Venetian maritime supremacy in the Mediterranean Sea. It begins around the year 1000 but cruises quickly through two centuries before exploding into life with a magnificent narrative of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, when Venice steered the crusaders to Constantinople and ended up with an empire of their own. It ends with the war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire in 1499-1503, when Venice lost its naval edge and reports from Portugal warned the Italians that they were about to lose their trading supremacy as well.

Crowley writes with real vigor about seafaring and war. You will rarely read better narratives of battles, sieges, or campaigns. He is not so great on anything else (money, trade, politics, art), but if you want action, he delivers. I also learned a great deal from this book about the Venetian empire, made up of islands like Crete and Corfu and scattered fortress ports on the mainland. For example, the Venetians ruled Crete with extractive zeal, imposing high taxes and waging near constant war against peasant resistance and banditry; for nearly a century they forbade cultivation of one of the island's most productive farming districts, determined to starve out the armed revolt raging there.

What moved me to write about this book was the horror of it all.

Crowley gives us the accounts of terrified passengers on galleys caught in storms, drenched and tossed around the ship in total darkness and awful fear, knowing they might soon be dead. As bad as storms were, dead summer calms could be even worse, dooming sailors to death by thirst or disease on the broiling sea. Then there were pirates, sometimes freebooters but more often the semi-deniable agents of one or another naval power. As if that wasn't enough, there was also the constant low-level skirmishing between Venetians and their Italian rivals, Pisans and Genoses, which regularly broke out in deadly riots even when the cities were theoretically at peace.

Crowley conveys the grim horror of battles between the crews of galleys, fighting as if on land but with the sea all around, their steel breastplates dooming them to a swift drowning if they fell overboard. Gruesome injuries were common, and something like a crossbow bolt through the cheek was so minor as to be hardly worth mentioning. 

It was not just the common sailors who suffered. Captains were expected to fight beside their men and were regularly killed, especially by enemy crossbowmen. If they lost the battle but survived they were sent back to Venice in chains to face trial as suspected enemies of the state, for Venice had no sympathy with losing commanders. Noblemen could also be sent as ambassdors to sultans or khans who might decide to imprison them or even behead them, which seems to have been a widely used diplomatic signal in the Middle East at the time. Or they might be slain in duels of honor with each other.

And this was the life of Venetians. Every years tens of thousands of Venetian men set sail on voyages from which they might very well not return. They might drown, or be slain, or be shipwrecked on some desert shore, or die of the plague in a foreign port where their ship ended up trapped by a quarantine. But they went, every year for nearly a thousand years.

It was mad.

But maybe human life has mostly been like that, a desperate struggle against dangers of a thousand kinds, when death could find you just easily at home as at sea, and all the routes out of dire poverty involved awful risk. And maybe one reason we are so unhappy in our fat, happy age is that we evolved in conditions like those of Venetian sailors and Cretan peasants, and some part of us longs for that kind of life and find our own age too boring to endure.

Today's Place to Daydream About: Cortona, Italy

Cortona is a famous Tuscan town on a hilltop overlooking the Val di Chiana. The place has been occupied since Etruscan times is now a regular part of Tuscan tours.

Remains of the old Etruscan stone walls are still visible in several places.

One of the longest texts in ancient Etruscan, the Cortona Tablet, comes from here; seems to record the settlement of legal dispute.

There is a Roman villa of the Augustan period that survives buried under later rubble, open to tours.

The main piazza is quiet delightful, with its 14-century town hall.

This plain little church has a fresco by Fra Angelico, 

and there is a lovely Annunciation (above) by the same artist in the local museum.

You can climb up to this sixteenth-century church for a better view across the valley.

You can see why several movies have been filmed here, including Under the Tuscan Sun.

As I wait impatiently for my body to recover from surgery, my thoughts go to places like Cortona, where ancient pasts and modern style mingle to create delight.

Basilica di Saccargia, Sardinia

The Basilica della Santissima Trinità di Saccargia is a Romanesque church in the comune of Codrongianos, in the northern part of Sardinia. 

The church was completed in 1116. The style is Romanesque, specifically that of Pisa. This site had long been the location of a monastery, and bits of its ruins poke out around the church.

The stone is black basalt and white limestone, taken from two nearby quarries.

View of the setting.

Not many photos online of the interior; the date of these frescoes is disputed, but some sources say they go back to the 12th century.

The church was abandoned in the 16th century, but was restored and reopened in the early 20th century.

Wonderful.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Noto, Sicily

Noto Cathedral

Noto, near the southeastern corner of Sicily, is an ancient place. It was already old to the Romans, and local legend had it that Daedalus stayed in the city after his flight over the Ionian Sea. It was conquered by Arabs in 866 and prospered under their rule; it fell to the Normans in 1061, the last prominent place on the island to be retaken by Christians. One assumes this left quite a legacy of old buildings.

Ducal Palace

But in 1693 Sicily was struck by a terribly destructive earthquake, thought by some modern geologists to have been the most powerful in Italian history. At least 60,000 people were killed and 70 towns and cities destroyed, including Noto.

Church of the Red Madonna

It was decided – no online source says by whom – to rebuild the city on a new site across the Asinaro River from the old town center. This meant building all the major public buildings (cathedral, palace, parish churches) anew. Because of this, the city boasts a remarkable collection of buildings from the 1695 to 1800 period. The style is probably best described as Baroque.

Church of the Dominican friary

And the Franciscan

Shame about all the lost Roman and medieval buildings, but rebuilding the town in this consistent style did leave a remarkable monument to a certain period of Sicily's past.

Etruscan Art in the MFA Boston

Cinerary Urn of Fastia Velsi, wife of Larza Velu, one of five ash urns found in a tomb of the Velsi family of ancient Chiusi. Third century BC

Fascimile done in the 1890s of a wall painting in the Tomba di Triclinio, c. 490 BC, and detail.

Painted Plaque from another tomb, c. 470 BC.

Mirror case showing Dionysis, Eros, and Pan, third century BC. That assemblage of gods conveys a certain notion of why people looked into mirrors.

His and hers sarcophagus lid, c. 330 BC. Etruscan tombs convey the impression that they were really into marriage.

Portrait in the form of a ceramic serving vessel

Statuette of a stooping athlete, c. 520 BC

Figurine of a man and woman in an ox car, c. 600 BC

Bronze sword, c. 850 BC

The Visconti-Sforza Tarot

The Sun, from the "Visconti-Sforza Tarot",

attributed to Franco dei Russi (1453-1482)

A surviving account book tells us that around 1442, the Duke of Milan gave his daughter a deluxe set of handcrafted playing cards in the pattern we call Tarot. This meticulously painted deck was valued at 1,500 ducats, 10 times the annual salary of a palace servant.

The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York has a bunch of Renaissance Italian tarot cards, some of which are probably associated with the Dukes of Milan. There are no complete sets, just various cards from several different sets executed by different artists. They describe these cards as the "Visconti-Sforza Tarot." The Viscontis and the Sforzas were two families that both held the rank of dukes of Milan, the Sforzas taking over (violently) from the Visconti in 1447. 

No expert myself, I find this designation misleading in the extreme, but anyway these are 15th-century tarot cards from northern Italy, and they are quite amazing.

Death and Judgment, attributed to 

Bonifacio Bembo (1420-1480)

Temperence, attributed to Franco dei Russi

The Three of Cups, attributed to Bonifacio Bembo. More at the NY Times

There is also a related set of cards known as the Cary Yale Playing Cards, now kept in the Beineke Library at Yale. These also date to the mid 1400s and are also from northern Italy, but the rest of what I read about them strikes me as speculation.

Quite delightful that so many of these little wonders survive in North American and European Collections.