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Cultural Parks
Places in the Vicenza area which have inspired great literary figures
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Looking at the landscape through the eyes of the protagonists in novels, poems or travel accounts and notes by intellectuals.
This is essentially what is presented in the guide "Parchi culturali nel Vicentino" (Cultural Parks in the Vicenza Area), which offers the opportunity to consider an area which has often been the natural background for literary creations from the Middle Ages right up to the present day, particularly prolific.
The landscape is the true protagonist of this small book, consisting of around eighty pages. It does not presume to be exhaustive, but rather acts as a stimulus for reading and re-reading and as a suggestion for places and areas to revisit, with the hope of encouraging the reader – and the visitor – to explore more thoroughly.
Schematic, didactic and instructive, enriched with a large number of quotes, the guide is divided into three sections, which may reserve some surprises for the wider public.
Indeed, whereas the pages dedicated to official itineraries, treading in the steps of famous travellers, follow the traditional pattern, with a single novelty in the comparison of generations between Wolfgang and August Goethe, the pages dedicated to 19th and 20th century literature also bring less well-known authors, such as Zanella, to our attention.
However it is perhaps the first section, dedicated to great love stories, which will prove most interesting for many.
In the guide the amorous adventure of Sordello and Cunizza da Romano is presented in such a way as to recreate the climate of the Ezzelini court for the reader, without stereotypes, rather than highlighting the more frivolous aspects of the liaison.
The delicate affair narrated by Luigi da Porto on the other hand sees presentation of the love story between Romeo and Juliet as an example of the difficult transition between heroic chivalrous deeds and the new world, with an interesting parallel in the landscape enjoyed from the castles of Montecchio.
Our attention is first directed towards the plain, then to the mountains, with a clear reference to Piovene, according to whom the Vicenza area is a land too close to the sea not to experience the breeze from the east, but so close to the mountains that it knows the icy winds of the north well.
The third great love story involving the Vicenza area as protagonist regards the events already well-researched by Povolo, who first established the close link between the Manzoni’s “The Betrothed” and the affairs of Paolo Orgiano in the lower Vicenza area.
These are three prototypes, destined in various ways to become a model for universally exported affairs, but which have their origin in the Vicenza area, reflecting its nature as a land of passage, perhaps even of conflict between different attitudes, in a setting and with a relationship which is anything but easy to decipher.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that this area has fascinated complex authors with strong personalities, such as Goethe, Nietzsche, Camus, Sand and Hemingway and that it has been the birthplace of writers, poets and journalists who have made their mark throughout the 20th century in Italy, from Fogazzaro, Piovene, Parise Meneghello and Stern to Bandini, Scapin and finally Gian Antonio Stella.
A slim and rapid volume containing eighty pages certainly could not hope to give a complete review of authors from Vicenza, also bearing in mind the need to match routes covering the whole area to the authors, opening up itineraries in areas which are often neglected by the guides, but which are none the less interesting, such as the Chiampo area.
The guide concludes with a passage dedicated to food, wine and the flavours passing from the table to the pages of books, from Piovene to Scapin.
Published by the Touring Club Italiano in collaboration with Consorzio Vicenza, co-ordinated by Cristina Baietta and written by Antonio Franzina, the guide to cultural parks in the Vicenza area offers a chance to discover another side to the Vicenza area, away from the traditional mould of tourism: an area to be visited first silently through reading and then to be observed, perhaps glimpsing unexpected visions of personalities and figures, but also poetry and sensations.
In short, it offers a way of experiencing tourism, whether through memories - and in this case the guide becomes an excuse for a very personal and Proustian exploration of forgotten flavours and authors (and this is valid for Zanella and Fusinato among others) – or in those “non places” inhabited by the literary creations which the Vicenza area is dotted with, half-way between the myth and the reality. |
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