Venice

The Bridge of Sighs is a bridge in Venice, northern Italy. The enclosed bridge is made of white limestone and has windows with stone bars. It passes... over the Rio di Palazzo and connects the old prisons to the interrogation rooms in the Doge's Palace. It was designed by Antoni Contino , and built in 1602. The view from the Bridge of Sighs was the last view of Venice that convicts saw before their imprisonment. The bridge name, given by Lord Byron in the 19th century, comes from the suggestion that prisoners would sigh at their final view of beautiful Venice through the window before being taken down to their cells. In reality, the days of inquisitions and summary executions were over by the time the bridge was built and the cells under the palace roof were occupied mostly by small-time criminals. In addition, little could be seen from inside the Bridge due to the stone grills covering the windows. A local legend says that lovers will be granted eternal love and bliss if they kiss on a gondola at sunset under the Bridge Of Sighs.
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The Patriarchal Cathedral Basilica of Saint Mark is the cathedral church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Venice, northern Italy. It is the most... famous of the city's churches and one of the best known examples of Byzantine architecture. It lies at the eastern end of the Piazza San Marco, adjacent and connected to the Doge's Palace. Originally it was the chapel of the Doge, and has only been the city's cathedral since 1807, when it became the seat of the Patriarch of Venice, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Venice, formerly at San Pietro di Castello. For its opulent design, gilded Byzantine mosaics, and its status as a symbol of Venetian wealth and power, from the 11th century on the building has been known by the nickname Chiesa d'Oro . The first St Mark's was a temporary building in the Doge's Palace, constructed in 828, when Venetian merchants stole the supposed relics of Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria.
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Teatro La Fenice is an opera house in Venice, Italy. It is one of the most famous theatres in Europe, the site of many famous operatic premieres.... Its name reflects its role in permitting an opera company to "rise from the ashes" despite losing the use of two theatres . Since opening and being named La Fenice, it has burned and been rebuilt twice more. In 1774, the San Benedetto Theatre, which had been Venice's leading opera house for more than forty years, burned to the ground. No sooner had it been rebuilt than a legal dispute broke out between the company managing it and the owners, the Venier family. The issue was decided in favor of the Veniers. The construction began in June 1790, and by May 1792 the theatre was completed. It was named "La Fenice", in reference to the company's survival, first of the fire, then of the loss of its former quarters. La Fenice was inaugurated on May 16, 1792 with an opera by Giovanni Paisiello entitled I Giuochi di Agrigento . From the beginning of the 19th century, La Fenice acquired a European reputation.
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The Rialto Bridge is one of the four bridges spanning the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. It is the oldest bridge across the canal, and was the... dividing line for the districts of San Marco and San Polo. The first dry crossing of the Grand Canal was a pontoon bridge built in 1181 by Nicolò Barattieri. It was called the Ponte della Moneta, presumably because of the mint that stood near its eastern entrance. The development and importance of the Rialto market on the eastern bank increased traffic on the floating bridge, so it was replaced in 1255 by a wooden bridge. This structure had two inclined ramps meeting at a movable central section, that could be raised to allow the passage of tall ships. The connection with the market eventually led to a change of name for the bridge. During the first half of the 15th century two rows of shops were built along the sides of the bridge. The rents brought an income to the State Treasury, which helped maintain the bridge. Maintenance was vital for the timber bridge. It was partly burnt in the revolt led by Bajamonte Tiepolo in 1310.
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The Anoo is a museum gallery of pre-19th century art in Venice, northern Italy. Situated on the south bank of the Grand Canal, within the sestiere... of Dorsoduro, it gives its name to one of the three bridges across the canal, the Ponte dell' Accademia, and to the boat landing station for the vaporetto water bus. It was originally created as an art school. The Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia was founded in 1750 by the Venetian Senate as Venice’s school of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Installed as its first president was Giambattista Piazzetta, with other advisors Giambattista Pittoni and Gianmaria Morlaiter. The aim was to replicate official institutions which had existed for many years in other major artistic centers including Rome , Florence , Milan, and Bologna . It was one of the first institutions to study art restoration starting in 1777 with Pietro Edwards, and formalized by 1819 as a course. Among teachers at the Academy in past and modern times were Tiepolo, Hayez, Nono, Ettore Tito, Arturo Martini, Alberto Viani, Carlo Scarpa, Afro, Santomaso, and Emilio Vedova.
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The Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia is an art collection and museum in Venice, Italy. Situated in the sestieri of Castello, on the left bank of the... Grand Canal, it includes famous paintings as a self- portrait and Adam and Eve by Palma the Younger, a Sacra Conversazione by Palma the Elder and a Madonna and Child by Bernardo Strozzi. It also holds prized drawings by Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, Paolo Veronese, Titian, and Tintoretto. The picture gallery is displayed within twenty rooms on the second floor of the palace which also contains furniture, porcelains and musical instruments, along with works by artists ranging from the 14th-18th century. The palazzo was renovated from its original state before the 1960s. From 1961–1963, Carlo Scarpa restored parts of the building, while changing others. Scarpa created a series of islands, and allowed the water to come into the lobby space. He also restored the idea of a courtyard garden behind the building, with an abstracted rill fountain. Later additions are by Mario Botta. The palace also houses the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, which sponsors a prominent library and contemporary art expositions.
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The Museum of Erotic Art was opened in February 2006, situated a few metres from St Mark's Square in Venice, Italy. It was twinned with the... Musée de l'Érotisme, in Paris and covered over 700 m² across four floors. The Museum was centred upon the colourful erotic and true history of Venice. The exhibits included various erotic writers associated with Venice, such as Aretino, Franco, Cappello, Baffo, or Casanova, as well as a section of unseen cuts from the films of the Venetian film director, Tinto Brass. The Museum closed in December 2006 after only ten months of operation, its publicity having been banned from all tourist bureaus in Venice and the Veneto region. The Church expressed great satisfaction at its closure, claiming that the Museum was an attack on the "dignity" of Venice.
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Palazzo Grassi is an edifice in the Venetian Classical style located on the Grand Canal of Venice, northern Italy. It was designed by Giorgio... Massari, and the building was completed between 1748 and 1772. The latecomer among the palaces on the Grand Canal of Venice, Palazzo Grassi has an academic classical style that is in contrast to the surrounding Byzantine Romanesque and Baroque Venetian palazzi. It has a formal palace façade, constructed in white marble, and lacking the lower mercantile openings typical of many Venetian patrician palaces. The Grassi family sold the palazzo in 1840, with ownership that followed passing through many different individuals. The Palazzo was purchased by the Fiat Group in 1983, under the late chairman Gianni Agnelli, and it underwent a complete restoration overseen by Count Antonio Foscari Widmann Rezzonico, the current owner of Villa Foscari. The group's aim was to transform Palazzo Grassi into an exhibition hall for the visual arts. It continues to be used as an art gallery today. Between 1984 and 1990, Pontus Hultén was in charge of the art museum which also contains a 600 seat outdoor theatre.
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Robert John Downey Jr. is an American actor who made his screen debut in 1970 at the age of five, appearing in his father's film Pound, and has... worked consistently in film and television ever since. During the 1980s, he had roles in series such as coming of age films associated with the Brat Pack. His role in Less Than Zero was the first time Downey's acting would be commended by critics. After Zero, Downey was cast in starring roles in bigger films, such as Air America , Soapdish , and Natural Born Killers . He played Charlie Chaplin in the 1992 film Chaplin, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Between 1996 and 2001, Downey was frequently arrested on drug-related charges. After being released from the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in 2000, Downey joined the cast of the hit television series Ally McBeal playing the new love interest of Calista Flockhart's title character. His performance was praised and received accolades, but his character was written out when Downey was fired after two drug arrests in late 2000 and early 2001.
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Sylvano Bussotti is an Italian composer of contemporary music whose work is unusually notated and often creates special problems of interpretation.... Born in Florence, Bussotti learned to play the violin as a child, becoming a prodigy. Later he studied at the Florence Conservatory , with Luigi Dallapiccola and with Max Deutsch in Paris. As a composer he was influenced by the twelve-tone music of Webern and later John Cage. Examples of his use of graphic notation in his pieces, often reflecting his personal life, include Lorenzaccio and La passion selon Sade. He pursues other disciplines including painting, graphic art, and journalism. Bussotti is also a well-known film director, actor, and singer. His uncle Tono Zancanaro and his older brother Renzo Bussotti strongly influenced his style in painting. He has written most of the librettos of his Operas. As a writer, his style is considered one of the most refined among the Italian poets and novelists of 20th century. French culture has fascinated him since he was a boy. His great friend Cathy Berberian was one of his most famous interpreters.
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Ulrich Tukur is a German actor and musician. Tukur spent his youth near Hanover where he finished his final secondary-school examinations in 1977.... He also achieved a high school degree in Boston during an exchange of students where he met his first wife, Amber Wood. By her, he had two daughters, Marlene and Lilian. While they were dating, he finished his time with the army and began to study German, English and History at Tübingen university. He worked as a musician to get some extra money. Someone who saw him asked him if he wanted to be in a play. Soon he became interested in acting and started to study acting at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart in 1980. After finishing his studies there in 1983 he played at a theatre in Heidelberg. While he was still a student he got a chance to star in his first movie. In Die Weiße Rose, directed by Michael Verhoeven, he plays the character of Willi Graf. In 1984 he had his breakthrough at the theatre when famous director Peter Zadek gave him a role at the Freie Volksbühne Berlin in Joshua Sobols play Ghetto.
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Stephen Moyer is an English actor who has starred as vampire Bill Compton in the HBO series True Blood since 2008. Moyer was born in Brentwood,... Essex. He attended St Martin's School, a comprehensive school in Hutton, Essex, and graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He became Brentwood Theatre's first patron in October 2007, especially supporting their "Reaching Out, Building On" campaign to help fund the 2008 completion of backstage facilities. After graduating from LAMDA, Stephen Moyer worked in theatre for five years. He worked with the National Theatre of Wales, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Oxford Stage Company, work which included going on tour and playing Romeo in productions of Romeo and Juliet. He then made the transition to television and film. On 5 August 2009, it was confirmed that Moyer had become engaged to Anna Paquin, who plays his character's love interest in the HBO series True Blood. They had been dating since filming the series pilot in 2007. On 21 August 2010, Moyer and Paquin married at a private residence in Malibu, California. They reside in Venice, Los Angeles.
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Alessandro Stradella was an Italian composer of the middle baroque. He enjoyed a dazzling career as a freelance composer, writing on commission,... collaborating with distinguished poets, producing over three hundred works in a variety of genres. Not much is known about his early life, but he was from a Tuscan aristocratic family, educated at Bologna, and was already making a name for himself as a composer at the age of 20. In 1667 he moved to Rome where he composed for Christina, Queen of Sweden, mostly sacred music. He was involved in performances of four operas, two by Francesco Cavalli and two by Antonio Cesti. Stradella began to live a dissolute life. With Carlo Ambrogio Lonati he attempted to embezzle money from the Roman Catholic Church, but was found out: he fled the city, only returning much later when he thought it was safe. His numerous incautious affairs with women began to make him enemies among the powerful men of the city, and he had to leave Rome for good. In 1677 he went to Venice, where he was hired by a powerful nobleman, Alvise Contarini, as the music tutor to his mistress, Agnese Van Uffele.
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Domenico Alberti was an Italian singer, harpsichordist, and composer whose works bridge the Baroque and Classical periods. Alberti was born in... Venice and studied music with Antonio Lotti. He wrote operas, songs, and sonatas for keyboard instruments, for which he is best known today. These sonatas frequently employ a particular kind of arpeggiated accompaniment in the left hand that is now known as the Alberti bass. It consists of regular broken chords, with the lowest note sounding first, then the highest, then the middle and then the highest again. This pattern is repeated. Today, Alberti is regarded as a minor composer, and his works are played or recorded only irregularly. The Alberti bass was used by many later composers, and it became an important element in much keyboard music of the Classical music era. An example of Alberti bass : In his own lifetime, Alberti was known as a singer. He often used to accompany himself on the harpsichord. Little is known of his life, but he was Venetian ambassador to Spain in 1736, where the famous castrato singer Farinelli heard him sing.
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Terence Hill is an Italian actor. He is best known for starring in multiple action and western films together with his longtime film partner Bud... Spencer. Hill was born in Venice, Italy. As a child, he lived in the small town of Lommatzsch, Germany from 1943 to 1945 during World War II, surviving the Dresden Bombing. His mother was German, his father an Italian chemist. After being discovered by Italian filmmaker Dino Risi for Vacanze col Gangster at an early age of 12, he had, after 27 movies in Italy , a major film role in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard . In 1964, he returned to Germany and there, appeared in a series of Heimatfilmen, adventure and western films, made after novels by German author Karl May. In 1967, he returned to Italy to act in God Forgives I Don't! . He changed his name to Terence Hill in the same year. The name was made up, as a publicity stunt, by the film producers; he had to choose from a list of twenty names and picked the one with his mother's initials.
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Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni was an Italian Baroque composer. While famous in his day as an opera composer, he is mainly remembered today for his... instrumental music, such as the concertos, some of which are regularly recorded. Born in Venice, Republic of Venice, to Antonio Albinoni, a wealthy paper merchant in Venice, he studied violin and singing. Relatively little is known about his life, especially considering his contemporary stature as a composer, and the comparatively well-documented period in which he lived. In 1694 he dedicated his Opus 1 to the fellow-Venetian, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni ; Ottoboni was an important patron in Rome of other composers, such as Arcangelo Corelli. Albinoni was possibly employed in 1700 as a violinist to Charles IV, Duke of Mantua, to whom he dedicated his Opus 2 collection of instrumental pieces. In 1701 he wrote his hugely popular suites Opus 3, and dedicated that collection to Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. In 1705, he was married; Antonino Biffi, the maestro di cappella of San Marco was a witness, and evidently was a friend of Albinoni's.
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Giovanni Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of... the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms. Gabrieli was born in Venice. He was one of five children, and his father came from the region of Carnia and went to Venice shortly before Giovanni's birth. While not much is known about Giovanni's early life, he probably studied with his uncle, the composer Andrea Gabrieli; he may indeed have been brought up by him, as is implied by the dedication to his 1587 book of concerti, in which he described himself as "little less than a son" to his uncle. He also went to Munich to study with the renowned Orlando de Lassus at the court of Duke Albert V; most likely he stayed there until about 1579. Lassus was to be one of the principal influences on the development of his musical style.
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Benedetto Giacomo Marcello was a Venetian composer, writer, advocate, magistrate, and teacher. Born in Venice, Benedetto Marcello was a member of a... noble family and his compositions are frequently referred to as Patrizio Veneto. Although he was a music student of Antonio Lotti and Francesco Gasparini, his father wanted Benedetto to devote himself to law. Benedetto managed to combine a life in law and public service with one in music. In 1711 he was appointed member of the Council of Forty , and in 1730 he went to Pola as Provveditore . Due to his health having been "impaired by the climate" of Istria, Marcello retired after eight years to Brescia in the capacity of Camerlengo where he died of tuberculosis in 1739. Benedetto Marcello was the brother of Alessandro Marcello, also a notable composer. On 20 May 1728 Benedetto Marcello married his singing student Rosanna Scalfi in a secret ceremony. However, as a nobleman his marriage to a commoner was unlawful and after Marcello's death the marriage was declared null by the state.
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Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari was an Italian composer and teacher. He is best known for his comic operas such as Il segreto di Susanna . A number of his... works were based on plays by Carlo Goldoni, including Le donne curiose , I quatro rusteghi and Il campiello . Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari was born in Venice in 1876, the son of an Italian mother and a German father. Ferrari was his mother's maiden-name, which he added to his own surname in 1895. Although he studied piano from an early age, music was not the primary passion of his young life. As a teenager Wolf-Ferrari wanted to be a painter like his father; he studied intensively in Venice and Rome and traveled abroad to study in Munich. It was there that he decided to concentrate instead on music, taking lessons from Josef Rheinberger. He enrolled at the Munich conservatory and began taking counterpoint and composition classes. These initially casual music classes eventually completely eclipsed his art studies, and music took over Wolf-Ferrari’s life. He wrote his first works in the 1890s. At age 19, Wolf-Ferrari left the conservatory and traveled home to Venice.
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