Goals and perspectives of the cultural institution for seventy years on the Island of San Giorgio. The president Giovanni Bazoli: here a meeting place of knowledge
The suffering dragon that collapses pierced by the spear of St. George calls for the victory of good over evil. Seventy years as the headquarters of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, after a thousand as a Benedictine monastery (982-1806) and 145 years of decay (1806-1951), the island of San Giorgio in Venice was reborn as the most incomparable place in the world. Director since 1987 and president since 1999, the president emeritus of Intesa Sanpaolo, Giovanni Bazoli, tells this story of rebirth.
“It has been twenty-three years of fidelity to the Foundation’s statute,” says Bazoli. «The Giorgio Cini Foundation is the legacy that Vittorio Cini left in Venice, his chosen city. In 1951 the Foundation was created, in memory of his son, in just three years. One of the two purposes of the statute was to promote the restoration of the monumental complex by creating new institutions on the island, which Cini has in concession from the state property. The second purpose was to to cultivate studies on the history of Venice as a meeting point of civilizationsand this is what has been done with the Institute of Art History, the Institute for the History of Society and the Venetian State, the Institute for Theater and Melodrama and Music and the Intercultural Institute of Studies musical “.
What can you say about the years leading up to your presidency?
«On the death of Vittorio Cini in 1977 the Foundation was entrusted to Bruno Visentini, with Renzo Zorzi. Zorzi was a scholar of great quality, Visentini was more managerial. Then I remember Vittore Branca and Feliciano Benvenuti. Benvenuti, who had been my teacher, was very cultured and did not show it. When I became president of the Nuovo Banco Ambrosiano I appointed him to the Banca Cattolica del Veneto, which traditionally financed the Cini. Branca was a free and broad-minded Catholic and was the most important scholar of Boccaccio and Dante. With him, the Center for Culture and Civilization favored manifestations of the highest level and advanced training courses were developed, which we have taken over with Carlo Ossola ».
Then came his years …
«I was very well received … perhaps because I was not Venetian! In 2000, Cini obtained for the first and only time to participate in the distribution of the funds provided for by the special law for Venice, necessary to carry out interventions on the monumental complex comparable in importance and breadth to those made by the founder. Thus, thanks also to an amendment to the statute that allowed the entry of supporting members (Intesa Sanpaolo, Assicurazioni Generali, Eni and Cariplo), we have undertaken the great interventions for the rebirth of the island. In 2002 I called Pasquale Gagliardi, who was director of the Istud professional training center, as general secretary: he showed entrepreneurial skills, imagination in innovation and interpersonal skills ».
Which interventions do you remember with most interest?
«The restoration of the Palladian refectory, with Adam Lowe’s cloned copy of the Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese without whom the space designed by Andrea Palladio was incomprehensible. Salvatore Settis encouraged the initiative and now the acrylic colors with which it is made and the Venetian light make the work more enjoyable than the original brought to the Louvre by Napoleon. Then the Manica Lunga library, with 60 thousand volumes, the exhibition center in the Convitto Halls, the Borges Labyrinth born from an abandoned space and the recovery of the Squero, which has become a magical place for listening to music with an incomparable view of the lagoon. Then the residence of the Vittore Branca International Study Center, the exhibition spaces where the seafaring school was, ten o’clock Vatican Chapels proposed by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi in 2018 as the participation of the Holy See in the Architecture Biennale and the glass rooms of the Landau collection: each of their exhibitions is carried out with abundance and completeness “.
Over the years, archive acquisitions and editorial proposals have continued.
«To the historical ones of Sibilla Aleramo, Eleonora Duse are added many musical archives, starting from that of Roman Vlad. For publishing, the Foundation has promoted great works such as theUniversal Encyclopedia of Art (15 volumes), theEncyclopedia of the show, The civilizations of the Eastl’Philosophical Encyclopedia. The green Theater conceived in 1954 by the architect Luigi Vietti still remains to be recovered ».
We look to the future. How to continue?
«With a statute modification that arranges the private presence and that promotes a scientific committee of particular characteristics. Furthermore, the time has come to publish a biography on the founder, Vittorio Cini, now that the family has made the archive available. A special commission will choose the biographer. Cini was a multifaceted figure, for decades, together with Count Volpi, protagonist of Venice and Italy ».
Does this mission of study of history still have reason to be and of Venice as a meeting point of civilizations and knowledge?
«Absolutely yes and the future program must be drawn up around this. The essential theme is that of the relationship between humanistic and scientific knowledge. Today scientific knowledge is prevalent and will become increasingly so also because, thanks to technology, it improves living conditions. But there are problems that science cannot solve on its own and something more than a generic respect for humanistic culture, the past and civilizations is needed. In the twentieth century we witnessed a tension between these two poles of knowledge as if one disavowed the other. Venice, San Giorgio and Cini are the ideal place for the integration between the two knowledges and between civilizations. The island of San Giorgio was at the center of the world when two G7s were hosted and an example of inclusiveness when, in the years of the Cold War, scholars from beyond the Curtain were allowed to participate in conferences. If I were not held back by a sense of proportion I would say that the Island of San Giorgio could also be useful today for Peace ».
The event and the volume
On Friday 21 October, at 4 pm, the seventy years of the Cini Foundation will be celebrated on the Island of San Giorgio in Venice with the presentation of the volume The Giorgio Cini Foundation. Seventy years of history, edited by Pasquale Gagliardi and Egidio Ivetic, (Marsilio). Participants Giovanni Bazoli, president of the Foundation; Egidio Ivetic, director of the Institute of History of the Venetian Society and State; Pasquale Gagliardi, former secretary general of the Foundation; Renato Brunetta, president of Venice, the World Capital of Sustainability; Ignazio Musu, teacher at Ca ‘Foscari; David Freedberg, lecturer at Columbia University; Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Foundation’s Institute of Art History
October 21, 2022 (change October 21, 2022 | 12:06)
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