Sometimes it's incredible to think that 61 years ago, in 1965, a group of teenagers posed for a photograph outside the church of San Giorgio Maggiore and The Cini Foundation as they took a break between classes on the very first edition of what was then called The Contemporary Europe Pre-University Course.
Now we have abbreviated it, and for the past few decades we are known as The John Hall Venice Course. John no longer comes to Venice, in his 93rd year he is enjoying a well-deserved retirement in the Italian countryside with his wife, dogs, cats and geese.
This year we are proud to have amongst our cohort, a grandson of one of those very first students!
Now, as you can see, there's a significant change in how students dress, and we have the luxury of colour phtography, but the core concept and approach of the experience and content of the course is virtually unchanged, with a fantastic programme of visits and lectures delivered to our wonderful students.
It's always such a treat to visit the Cini Foundation, which is where my father based the course activities for a number of years. We can admire, amongst many other delights, the 'facsimile' of Veronese's 'Miracle at Cana' that had been stolen by Napoleon's troops in 1797 and still hangs in The Louvre, pathetically ignored by the hordes who gaze at Leonardo's magnificent Mona Lisa. In 2006 the Factum Arte company, led by Adam Lowe, who was on the 1978 Course with me digitally scanned and reproduced an extraordinary copy for the Palladian refectory of the Bededictine monastery that is now The Cini Foundation, thus making sense of the vast space that was designed by both Andrea Palladio and Veronese.
The Novelist, Richard Powers, writing in 2020 'Saving the Best Wine for Last' in The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality said "To fill a refectory wall at the height of The Renaissance with an ancient story of renewal is an act of mastery, faith, cohesion, exuberance and conviction. To restore that same wall with that same ancient episode - after Darwin, after Hiroshima, after the Launch of Interrplanetary Probes, after Colonisation, after the Onset of Global Warming and Mass Exctinction, after Nanocomputing, after the Discovery of the Molecular Basis of Life - and to do so with the technologies that have broken free of any individual ability to understand now becomes an act of near-peverse regeneration'
We had the opportunity to walk around, up the spectacular stairs designed by Longhena in 1643, into the library, also designed by him (sadly looted by the French) and through the Manica Lungha that is now an awesome open access Art History library, originally designed for the monks in the 15th century by Giovanni Buora and in 2005 repurposed by Michele de Lucchi, and finally to the labyrinth maze commissioned by the widow of Jorge Luis Borges
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