1. Palazzo Soranzo Cappello – the Aspern Papers garden
It takes a deep breath, a fleet foot and certain nonchalance to visit one of the loveliest wild gardens in Venice. It used to be a sure thing to stroll through the hall of the Palazzo Soranzo Cappello on Rio Manin. But these days you may be accosted by a humourless official, talking severely of the danger of falling trees. Even while he lectures you, it’s possible to take a good look at the classical garden with a neoclassical loggia and the statues of eleven pudgy Roman emperors.
In Henry James’s 1888 novella The Aspern Papers, the morally-compromised hero pretends an interest in the ‘garden in the middle of the sea’ to gain access to a secretive and shrivelled lady, said to have a trove of letters belonging to a literary lion.
Like all formal gardens, the Soranzo Cappello’s is a mixture of nature and culture, sensual pleasure and geometry, birdsong and silence, light and shade, rampant life and memorials of the dead. There’s a small orchard and an intoxicating wall of wisteria, if you happen to visit in the spring.
The site adjoins the great palace of the Gradenigo family, and the gardens of the two have blurred historical borders. The Bragadin family owned the site originally; a Lorenzo Soranzo bought it in 1612. After the family died out in 1788, the palazzo was bought by Antonio Cappello. Like Venice herself, both house and garden underwent periods of fierce prosperity and desperation. By 1989, it was disintegrating and bought by the Italian state. A restoration in 2004 has been followed by a new period of picturesque abandonment.
Where: Santa Croce 770, now offices of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici e Paesaggistici
2. Rialto Market
Pietro Aretino was born in Arezzo, the illegitimate son of a nobleman. His vibrant literary talents led him to Rome. His Sonetti Lussuriosi – Salacious Sonnets – describing sixteen sexual positions, lovingly illustrated by Giulio Romano, was a great favourite with Venice’s Giacomo Casanova, who never went anywhere without it.
Unfortunately the sonnets and other controversial and caustic writings led Aretino into trouble with Pope Leo X.
In 1527, he fled to Venice, where papal devotion was never top of the list. (The Venetian proverb says, first Venetians, then Christians).
The Rialto market is the best place to remember Pietro Aretino. From it you can see one of the houses he occupied in Venice – the Palazzo Bolani Erizzo, from which he observed the skirmishes of the fishwives with enormous gusto while maintaining his own luxurious and uproarious harem.
No one loved Venice more than Pietro Aretino. In a memorable letter, he opined, ‘If Eden, where Adam dwelt with Eve, had resembled Venice she would have had a hard time trying to tempt him out of that earthly paradise with her fruit.’
There are other places in Venice that record the genial Aretino. His spirit hovers around the House of the Spirits in the Misericordia, where he used to meet with his great friends Titian and Jacopo Sansovino, who sculpted the writer’s tawny head for the entrance to the sacristy of San Marco.
Aretino died in Venice in 1556, allegedly from apoplexy brought on by laughing at a filthy joke.
Where: 42 San Polo, 30125 Venice, Italy
