In our Imagining Venice class, we don’t plan to spend too much time discussing contemporary Italian politics, and our focus on social concerns will revolve more around the ways in which pollution and tourism are affecting Venice in particular. But with all of the fuss about Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that’s been showing up in the media lately, I thought it was worth a quick mention.

The New York Times has published a quick rundown of the latest Berlusconi scandal, titled “Surreal: A Soap Opera Starring Berlusconi,” which describes the accusations that Italy’s prime minister, now 74, had sex with a minor (the now-18 “Ruby Rubacuore”), as well as a number of other women. Those of us who have been watching Berlusconi’s antics from afar over the years know that accusations of marital infidelity are hardly anything new, although the suggestion that he dallied with a minor has raised the scandal bar a few notches.

What’s startling to most U.S. observers is that Berlusconi has gotten away with so much for so long with so little objection from his constituency. The NYT article notes:

…[T]he full drama has been airing for the 17 years that Mr. Berlusconi has been Italy’s most colorful politician, playing to an audience shaped by the sensationalist television culture he helped create in his three decades as Italy’s largest private broadcaster.

No U.S. politician rocked by so many scandals — especially sex scandals — would survive his or her next election, but the voting majority of Italians have been forgiving, probably for several reasons: Berlusconi owns and controls a number of major media outlets in Italy; he’s rich enough to afford the best lawyers and spin doctors; he’s charming and full of jokes; the opposition parties aren’t well-organized; Italians (especially the men) tend to be more forgiving of their politician’s private peccadillos; and until recently Berlusconi’s government was quietly supported by the Vatican. In short, he has been likened to a feudal lord, above reproach, whose charm and wealth have kept his subjects faithful no matter what he does in his castle’s private chambers.

The Church’s recent criticism of his actions may be especially problematic for the prime minister, as it often was for those feudal lords, however. In addition, Berlusconi is still faced with running a country that has the euro region’s second-largest debt burden. He narrowly squeaked past a no-confidence vote in December of last year, however, so it seems that he will remain in power for some time to come.

I couldn’t resist snapping this quick screen shot from the end credits of Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji) episode 14: His Butler, Supremely Talented. Sebastian and Ciel on a funeral gondola! Very dying-Venice, don’t you think?

(But no, Black Butler isn’t about Venice at all; the image is set on the Thames for some odd reason.)

Fore more on various anime versions of Venice, see my posts about Hetalia and Aria….

While talking to Terry about this class today, I suddenly remembered another manga/anime series besides Hetalia that refers to Venice — Aria, set in the early 24th century on the planet Aqua. In this highly praised series, 15-year-old Akari Mizunashi comes to the watery planet to learn how to become a gondolier in the tourist-ridden city of Neo-Venezia. It’s interesting, given our recent post on the struggle female gondoliers have been facing to be accepted in Venice, that all of her fellow “undines” (as they’re called in the series) are female, as well.

The city of Neo-Venezia was created in honor of the Earth city of Venice, which was destroyed, according to the series, in the 21st century.

The manga has been given high reviews for its quiet, introspective mood and beautiful artwork, and the equally lovely anime is available in English from Right Stuf (see official website). This illustration from the anime shows our heroines standing in Piazza San Marco next to the doge’s palace… but you recognized the setting already from browsing our photos, didn’t you?

Here’s the trailer, for anyone interested!

Even the Doctor thinks Venice is a pretty amazing city! Of course, much of this episode wasn’t actually filmed in Venice, but, hey, enjoy the footage that was.

In this scene, the Doctor expounds on some of the same reasons Terry and I think it’s worth taking a class of students to La Serenissima. Students, note the history and check out the famous view of San Giorgio! Of course, Terry and I don’t owe Casanova a chicken. Dare we even speculate about under what circumstances the Doctor came to owe Casanova a chicken? If he were Cpt. Jack Harkness, we might hazard a guess, but….

At any rate, our class will try to avoid running into any vampires on our trip. Although Venetian vampires do fit well into the “Venice as dying” and “Venice as immortal” themes of the course….

Dru's Fantasy City of Saldon

Confession time: I grew up playing and running Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, I was About.Com’s Guide to Roleplaying Games for a number of years, and I still manage to make it out to a tabletop AD&D game once a month. At one point I had an extensively developed personal campaign world, Samru, in which I set complex campaigns for over fifteen years.

This image is a very tiny version of a very old map I drew of the fantasy city Saldon. Saldon was the setting for a novel I was writing while I was in high school and then turned into a city setting for a roleplaying campaign.

Not surprisingly, considering that I was living in Naples while I was in high school writing about Saldon, it’s an amalgam of two Italian cities that left a distinct impression on my teenage imagination: Capri and Venice. Saldon is a terraced, closely built-up city on an island (akin to Capri), in which one of the terraces has collapsed and now consists of canals running through crumbling old buildings (the Venetian influence). The “sunken” terrace was, in my writing and roleplaying, a haunt for the rejected parts of society: the impoverished, the outcasts, and the anti-authoritarian.

One of the challenges facing me as I develop this class is the same one that we’ll be posing to our students — to define Venice as a personal symbol. As I contemplate what Venice means to me, I realize how long and in how many ways it’s had an influence on my own imagination. I lived in Italy from ages 15 to 18; I think I visited Venice twice during that time, once with my family and once on a school field trip. I returned to Venice while I was attending college, visited it again in 2000, and then lived there for several months in 2006. Why does the city keep drawing me back? Why have I incorporated it into my fiction and my roleplaying? What does that method of incorporation suggest about how Venice operates as a personal symbol in my psyche?

I’m still working through the question. But I hope our students will find Venice as memorable as I did as a teenager, when I first stepped out of the train station and saw its timeless canals and churches spread before me like the promise of a future I never could have imagined.

It’s easy to plan a trip by thinking,  “well, students won’t want to spend all two weeks in Venice, so we’d better throw in some side excursions and take them down to Florence to make sure we attract enough to ‘make’ the class.”  And that kind of pragmatic planning can’t be ignored. But I dipped into the academic literature on travel courses today and quickly found “Travel as Performed Art” by Judith Adler, which offers another way in which to consider travel planning:

Travel undertaken and executed with a primary concern for the meanings discovered, created, and communicated as persons move through geographical space in stylistically specified ways can be distinguished from travel in which geographical movement is merely incidental to the accomplishment of other goals. Whether skillfully fulfilling the conventions of a canonized tradition without any deviation, deliberately challenging received norms, or being led through the motions of a “packaged” performance designed and sold by  others, the traveler whose activity lends itself to conceptual treatment as art is one whose movement serves as a medium for bestowing meaning on the self and the social, natural, or metaphysical realities through which it moves. Performed as an art, travel becomes one means of “worldmaking” [...] and of self-fashioning. (p. 1368, emphasis added)

In an ideal world where cost was no object, Terry and I would have loved to create a “Grand Tour” class, which would be the “conventions of a canonized tradition” version mentioned above. As it is, we’re offering something more pop-culture, the “‘packaged’ performance,” although I hope that by involving students directly in artistic process and requiring an active, ongoing level of meaning-making, we can turn the process itself into art.

This is something to keep thinking about as we plan….

Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 94, No. 6 (May, 1989), pp. 1366-1391 Published by: The University of Chicago Press. Online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2780963