The Most Serene Rulers of Sicily

Venice is a mirror, a fish when viewed from above, and so the best way to arrive would be by sea, as Thomas Mann suggested. It is almost as though arriving in the lagoon city were an experience, a rite, rather than a stop on a tourist itinerary: water, a primordial tangle of islands, gold, embroidery, stones smoothed by the waves, fierce seagulls and shadows concealing destinies. In this port city – a sweet and bewitching trap, foul-smelling yet resplendent – three Sicilian wanderers have arrived: travellers and voluntary exiles, not for tourism but for work, for an award, for government: Ferdinando Scianna, Emma Dante and Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. The first with an exhibition on the Jewish Ghetto, right inside the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo; Emma Dante, who at the start of the summer received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement; and Buttafuoco, who is the skilful helmsman of this Biennale – theatre, dance, music, architecture, art, cinema.

Three different destinations, three different ways of losing oneself in Venice, loving it and being loved by it, each in their own way. Remaining faithful to a single island, Sicily, which, as Buttafuoco suggests, “has never known the narrow-minded logic of a cramped courtyard because, like Venice, it too has always been in the middle of the sea”.

“I have a problem with Venice,” says Scianna, who has just turned eighty-three and has been carrying a camera slung over his shoulder for half a century, “but I don’t think I’m the only one; we all do. The city is very demanding; it’s difficult to capture it without being overwhelmed by its splendour, by its charisma.” The great Sicilian photographer confesses with a hearty laugh at the exhibition “Ferdinando Scianna at the Ghetto in Venice” at the historic Ikona Gallery (until 22 November): “I know few photographers who’ve managed it – such as my friend Berengo Gardin, through his focus on everyday life, or Campigotto, who photographed it at night in a fantastic way. I’ve done many things in Venice, but I always got carried away.’ That natural charisma of the city has, in the past, made many lose their heads: Thomas Mann, who described its ambiguous eroticism as a trap for foreigners; Iosif Brodskij, who made his finest pages shine upon its waters; and Geoff Dyer, who gave himself over to the wildest vernissages and cocktail parties.

“The one in the Ghetto was my last photographic project. After a site visit, I’d come to realise that, at the end of the day, it was just a square, a small neighbourhood,” says Scianna with a touch of bitterness, alluding to his mobility issues which have for some time now hampered his brisk stride in pursuit of the ‘decisive moment’ – that fleeting glimpse of reality to be captured through the lens. The photographer had arrived in the city in 2016 to mark the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Jewish Ghetto and was convinced he could pull it off, given the confined topography of that ‘island within an island’, by narrowing his focus down to the bare essentials. Not the whole city, not the gondolas, not the bridges for lovers, but a tiny patch of land measuring just a few hundred metres: “If I get tired, I’ll rest, I told myself; it’s not even a small village, it’s a neighbourhood,” he continues, recalling the whole month he spent in close contact with the Jewish community, “I’ve always been very fascinated by the people of the community and I carried out the work with great pleasure alongside them, with passion but also with difficulty. No doorbells on Saturdays, no electricity…’ His laughter rings out, genuine and sincere, as he lists the rules – not so different from those learnt by the young Ferdinando, who came of age photographing religious festivals and Catholic processions for his first book, "Feste religiose in Sicilia", co-authored with Leonardo Sciascia in 1965 when he was just twenty-one. “We are children of the same madness, in a sense, and for this work I have spent a long time observing a place that has lived through its own story – not a grand one, but full of pain, full of events and people.”

Those photographs, so full of life and stories, are being exhibited again today, ten years on from the first exhibition commissioned by Fabio Achilli, Director of the Fondazione Venezia, thanks to the tireless work of gallery owner Ziva Kraus, who is the living memory of Ikona Gallery and the driving force behind the cultural life of a ‘threshold gifted to life’. ‘I am a messenger between the artwork and the public,’ says this extraordinary woman poetically of herself; a Croatian-born painter who arrived in Venice as a teenager to heed an inner voice she has never been able to escape. “I am a prisoner of Venice,” she remarks with irony and an almost Kafkaesque sobriety, having brought half a century of international photography to the lagoon, from Berenice Abbott to Helmut Newton, from William Klein to Gisèle Freund. “Scianna’s photography transcends; it literally casts its shadow,” emphasises the gallery owner, who, as a very young woman, worked as Peggy Guggenheim’s assistant at Palazzo Venier. Forty years after that experience, which Kraus describes as “simple, kind, without pretence”, she curated the exhibition “Peggy Guggenheim in Photographs” (2016) at her Ikona Gallery, as a sort of homecoming to restore the city’s memory. Just as showing Scianna’s photographs in Venice, for Venice, serves to do the same.

On the walls of Ikona – a small, cosy rectangle traversed by a staircase leading to an imaginary elsewhere – Scianna’s meticulous black-and-white work seems to be reflected endlessly in a mirror. Venice gazing at itself, the Campo del Ghetto mirrored within itself, a little girl on a skateboard vanishing into the shadows of the portico. That low stone portico at the gallery’s entrance is both reality and fiction, community life and an image captured on film. A minuscule ‘forma urbis’ which, however, stretches upwards, given the confined dimensions of the campo, as if it were a medieval town. Yet it transforms the classic low-rise houses of the Ghetto into lagoon-side skyscrapers. In the sixteenth century, four Christian guards, appointed by the Republic but paid by the Jews, were tasked with opening the gates at dawn and closing them at night, patrolling the perimeter of the Ghetto by boat. Accompanied by Ziva Kraus, Scianna walked at the same slow pace for a long time, ready to capture faces, gestures, reflections, celebrations and prayers. An entire humanity encapsulated in a small square. And then, at night, in a flash, one of the most dreamlike images to feature in the exhibition appeared to him: a light on in a window and the shadow of a man smoking a cigarette whilst gazing into the infinite: ‘It’s one of the ones I like best. That figure that appeared out of the blue seemed to me like an apparition from history,” says the photographer, who returned to the city last year as a guest at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, starring in Roberto Andò’s documentary Il fotografo dell’ombra. A year on, he still recalls, with emotion, the warm reception from the public and laughs heartily at his appearance on the red carpet: “I was really amused to be there like an actor, with my fellow photographers teasing me. It was marvellous, great fun.”

“I have the feeling that I’ve changed, but I don’t feel that Venice has changed,” confesses Emma Dante, a writer, actress and playwright from Palermo, when asked about her relationship with the city twenty-two years after her debut at the 2004 Theatre Biennale with La scimia and following this year’s success with I fantasmi di Basile, a play exploring the world of the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, the 17th-century author of Cunto de li cunti and the first great inventor of the modern fairy tale. “However, as Venice is an immortal city and I, on the other hand, am utterly mortal, utterly frail in my little life, it seems to me that returning to Venice is always a bit like acknowledging – and therefore accepting – one’s own mortality,” adds the director in a faint voice. It is the same voice, choked with emotion, with which, upon receiving the Golden Lion, she read her acceptance speech – written so that “I can concentrate on reading it and won’t start crying”. In its citation for the award, the Biennale emphasised how, through her theatre, Emma Dante has brought Sicily back into the limelight, revitalising the great legacy of Pirandello, Sciascia and Camilleri, alongside Ciprì, Maresco and Franco Scaldati. “Art is an artistic gesture that always has to do with one’s own origins, with the people who accompany us, and above all with bonds,” Emma Dante read out at the awards ceremony, “I believe that theatre has a vital social function of reflection and of caring for society, and so for me it is a way of making people reflect, of sending out messages, but also, above all, of reflecting myself on the injustices of the world.”

“When I attended the performance of ‘I fantasmi di Basile’,” says Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of the Venice Biennale Foundation since 2023, “seeing the actors’ skill and the carefully calibrated dramatic structure that Emma Dante’s direction sought to establish, I saw everything – absolutely everything – that constitutes the alchemical principle of theatre. An archetype, something that delves deep within.” Buttafuoco, who has always had a very strong connection with the stage – having previously chaired the Teatro Stabile di Catania and the Teatro Stabile d’Abruzzo – speaks of Emma Dante’s production with great enthusiasm: “In her work, I recognised the ‘posteggia’, Neapolitan street theatre, at the moment when the two actors on stage, through mime, the techniques of waiting and pause, were repeating what is characteristic of both street performers and acrobats, and of the desperate and the starving. And, if we may say so in parentheses, in a whisper, at one point they even seemed to me like Franco and Ciccio. That is to say, those who truly managed to keep everyone glued to their seats, mouths agape – children and adults, the learned and the simple-minded, the know-it-alls and the malicious. In short, the audience, made up of a multitude of faces, in this wholly feminine ability to portray what lies at the very beginning and what awaits us at the end.”

The President of the Biennale is a force of nature, indeed a sea in a joyful storm: despite it being a Sunday, he responds to Il Foglio from his office, with two windows identical to those of a mosque, overlooking the Grand Canal with the Giudecca opposite. He recounts that when Pinault (the French entrepreneur and art collector, owner of the Pinault Collection at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana) hoists the Breton flag over his museum, he sentimentally hoists that of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in an imaginary exchange of greetings. “I live in absolute privilege, because I work every day on the Grand Canal, which is the embodiment of a history that has never grown old – that of Venice”. Listening to his stories, it is natural to recall the verses with which his friend Franco Battiato compared Venice to Istanbul – the same palaces clinging to the sea, red sunsets fading into nothingness – two sister cities sharing the same vocation as a bridge between worlds and seas. On the subject of the success of his Biennale—among the surprises: art entrusted to Koyo Kouoh, theatre to Willem Dafoe, music to the very young Caterina Barbieri, and architecture, in 2025, to Carlo Ratti—Buttafuoco replies with typical Sicilian understatement: “I don’t know, I just do my job,” but he adds seriously that his sole guiding principle is “the Biennale’s 131-year history, that is, being a universal point of reference”. The Biennale is an institution open to all peoples. When asked about the sound his Venice makes—the city’s deep pulse that can be heard by pressing one’s ear to its heart—he replies with a chuckle: “Duri i banchi, the Venetians tell me as I walk through the calli. A warning, a lesson for me,” which recalls the order given to rowers to cling to the benches of their ships before ramming an enemy.

“Venice is a vast mirror; we see our wrinkles, the furrows of time, where we recognise ourselves as human beings,” concludes Emma Dante, “it is a different kind of water from what we Sicilians are used to. A water that speaks more of reflection than of freedom. We Sicilians are faced with this gaze that is lost on the horizon, which can no longer distinguish things because the sea erases the future. Only the sea that merges with the sky. Venice, on the other hand, tells the story of the reflection of who we are.”

Recalling that magical night, when she was awarded a prize in recognition of a brilliant career—one in which her native Palermo seems, somewhat capriciously, to take no interest—the director remembers “a broken voice, a powerful emotion. I remember myself as a little girl, receiving an important prize from Mum and Dad”.

All three Sicilians, once they arrived in Venice, seem to have found a home rather than just a port city. With slow but deliberate steps, Emma Dante, too, walks through the silent streets where the heels of her shoes whisper to the world: ‘The sound of Venice is my footsteps… it is as if they were saying: I exist’. Because Venice, as Ziva Kraus also says from the shadows of the Ghetto’s portico, ‘Venice saves everyone’.