IL VENETO
Photographs: mid 19th to early 20th century

The circa two hundred photographs range from its beginnings to the 1930s. They are divided into sectors devoted to the provinces of the Veneto; Belluno, Treviso, Padua, Rovigo, Vicenza, Verona and naturally Venice and its Lagoon, highlighting the overall image of a significant part of the Grand Tour.
Some of the incunabola of historical photography are also on exhibit, from the "virtual" and on the whole little known views of Padua the English astronomer John Herschel made in 1824 with the camera lucida, a pre-photographic instrument. The historical itinerary initiated by Ellis and Ruskin in the eighteen forties then continues in the Excursions daguerriennes by the French publisher Lerebours. The great collodion photographs by Carlo Ponti and Carlo Naya in Venice are flanked by illustrious "amateur photographers", such as the aristocratic Loredana da Porto Barbaran (Stieglitz discovered her at the end of the nineteenth century), and Count Giuseppe Primoli, perhaps the most significant Italian photographer at the turn of the century, often a guest in Venice of his friend Fortuny and the divine Duse.
Included in the exhibition are autochrome images made for the "Archives of the Planet" by the photographers of the Paris banker Albert Kahn. There is also a noteworthy series of pictures of street vendors in the Veneto, hand colored and for the most part never before seen. The pictures by Tomaso Filippi, who took over the Ditta Naya, come from the rare album devoted to the Islands of the Lagoon, commissioned in 1887 by the City of Venice on the occasion of the first exhibit of Art at the Gardens, which led to the constitution of the Biennale in 1895.
The Tour of the Veneto continues into the early decades of the twentieth century, with photographs by the most important studios in the cities of the Veneto

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