Eventually I will have to stop collecting comics about Venice - there are simply too many. It's no wonder comic artists are attracted to Venice. As Kia Vahland has recently written in a German newspaper article: "The principle of resilience through beauty has a long...
The "Palestrina Mosaic" or "Nile mosaic of Palestrina", a town near Italy's capital Rome, is a late Hellenistic floor mosaic depicting the Nile in its passage from the Blue Nile to the Mediterranean. Around 100 BCE, Nile landscapes were quite a fashion in Roman art....
The erupting mount Vesuvius in Italy is one of the most popular motives in modern art history, particularly throughout the 18. and 19. Century - at least as far as disasters go. Between 1766 and 1779 the volcano erupted several times, giving artists occasions to...
The Bavarian city of Nürnberg (Nuremberg) has been flooded quite often over it's history. The flood of 1909 is particularly memorable and the most severe flood that has been documented in photography. The visual similarity to Venice, apparent in pictures like these,...
In a 1971 special edition of Architectural Review devoted to the lagoon city author Jan Morris proposes to simply let the city sink. It's a polemical claim, but one that takes the ambivalences and dilemmata of historic heritage seriously. A different, longer version...
Every year at Ascension Day (Ascensione di Cristo, or "Festa della Sensa" as the Venetians say, it is celebrated in May) the Republic of Venice celebrates itself but also it's intimate relationship to the sea. In the age of Renaissance the head of state, called the...
I first became aware of the presence of climate refugees from Bangladesh in Venice, Italy, through a remark, Amitav Ghosh made in his book "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable" from 2016. There the Indian-US-American novelist notes that Bengali...
One of the best known folktales from Sicilly is the story of the amphibic boy Colapesce, who saves the city Messina (or the island of sicily according to some texts) from drowning. There are several divergent versions of the story, apparently the oldest one dating...
In the Donald Duck story "Zio Paperone e la deriva dei monumenti" by Italian comic artists Giorgio Pezzin and Giorgio Cavazzano, Uncle Scrooge together with Donald and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie save the historic buildings of Venice from rising floods....
In 1783 an unsual seismic event sequence occured along the Strait of Messina between the island Sicily and mainland Italy. Katrin Kleemann from LMU Munich writes: "Between 5. February and 28. March 1783, five strong earthquakes shook Calabria and Sicily and were...