Scuola Piccola Zattere presents an exhibition by Alvise Bittente (Venice, 1973), an artist who works primarily with drawing, through which he develops works characterized by a subtle elegance imbued with irony. With refined humor, Bittente observes reality by dwelling on minimal and seemingly marginal details, on which he lays a contemplative and dreamlike gaze, bringing to the surface stories otherwise destined to go unnoticed.

The series presented here was born in the framework of a collaboration with Luca Scarlini (Florence, 1966), essayist, performer and playwright, who invited the artist to contribute to his book Nuova guida sentimentale di Venezia (Marsilio, 2024) with research, maps, itineraries and, in particular, with illustrations. The book tells the stories of figures from multiple geographies who, at least for a period of their lives, lived in Venice. Scarlini and Bittente trace a diachronic and relational map of the Venetian cultural fabric, evoking in this unexpected guide to the city voices and stories that have passed yet are ever-present. The iconography of the stories, sometimes adhering to historical reality, sometimes imaginative, contributes to the creation of a mythology set in Venice, which has always been a device of fabulation. The selection presented in these spaces includes drawings present within the book, along with others not published and some new productions made by the artist on the occasion of the exhibition.

The display traces the unprecedented toponymy devised by Scarlini in the book, placing the individuals narrated in the territories that have hosted them: from the Vasca of the Zattere to the Giungla, the tangled area between Rialto and San Marco, passing through the Atollo composed of the Lido and other islands, and continuing through the Ombra, representing Giudecca, then the Pozzo, corresponding to the Ghetto area, and the Vena, the city’s main waterway. In particular, the Vasca has hosted figures such as Modigliani, Ezra Pound and De Pisis, as well as the poet and essayist Diego Valeri, who inspired the title of Scarlini’s book and of this exhibition. The Vena has been traversed by figures including the famous composer and conductor Bruno Maderna, who as a child – Scarlini recounts – was forced by his father to play at length aboard the ferry that traveled along the Grand Canal, which in Canale satellite Bittente transforms into a tortuous liquid score. The artist’s drawings thus suggest the presence of parallel geographies and the figures who silently traversed them.