Toto Bergamo Rossi – författare

A lush look into Venice’s verdant gardens, photographed in every season of the year

Turquoise lagoons and crystalline canals, criss-crossed by romantic bridges and traversed by singing gondoliers on their gondolas: water is considered by many to be Venice’s most enchanting feature. Yet on the little land that constitutes this ancient city, secret and sumptuous gardens lie waiting to cast their captivating spell. This lushly illustrated volume takes readers inside Venice’s most undiscovered and most exclusive green spaces across the city. The gardens of the palazzi that overlook the Grand Canal, along with the more vernacular ones of the lagoon islands, are captured throughout the seasons: the flowering in spring, the opulence of summer, the colors of fall and the frost of winter. Photographer Marco Valmarana’s exquisite images evoke a sense of wanderlust enough to inspire even the most jaded traveler. To walk the reader through the legacy of these special spaces, author Toto Bergamo Rossi recounts the evolution and history of the Venetian garden alongside a glossary of commonly used plants. The Gardens of Venice also includes a special foreword by designer Diane von Furstenberg.Toto Bergamo Rossi, formerly a specialist in the conservation of stone materials, has restored a number of important monuments in Italy. Since 2010 he has served as the director of Venetian Heritage. He is the author of Inside Venice (Rizzoli, 2016) and Venice and Its Doges (Rizzoli, 2023).

An up-to-date reading of the ways in which the public image of a Venetian prelate came to be defined through his portraiture

This exquisite, richly illustrated catalog documents a dossier exhibition held at Venice’s Museo di Palazzo Grimani, presenting three portraits of the Venetian prelate Giovanni Grimani, a collector of antiquities and patron of important 16th-century artists. The first, already in the collection at Palazzo Grimani, is the work of Domenico Tintoretto (1560–1635) and depicts the patriarch in old age in an iconography that can be found in earlier portraits, including the Portrait of the Patriarch Giovanni Grimani in the Schorr Collection (London), and a small oil on panel representing the same subject, now in a private collection, both painted by his father, Jacopo Tintoretto (1518–94). This unprecedented comparison, in addition to bearing witness to the iconographic evolution of effigies of the Venetian prelate over the course of several decades, helps to outline a history of Venetian portraits during that period.