Venezia e il Canal Grande nella cultura popolare cinese

The main purpose of this essay is to provide the reader with a general overview of the many facets that Venice and her most representative landmark, the Grand Canal, have embodied in the popular culture of Chinese-speaking world of the last decades. Famous and less-known movies from both mainland China and Taiwan, pop-rock musical videoclips, articles in popular magazines and other examples concurr to build an image of the Italian city that has as little resemblance with Venice as the reinterpretation of her architectural and urbanistic features offered by many postmodern “Oriental Venices” (i.e. compounds and resorts in a so-called “Venetian style” that are developing in most suburban residential areas in China). This image of the city is essentially based on both ancient and new stereotypes, in most cases of literary origin, that still persist also in higher cultural domains. In this analysis, the Author also provocatively suggests that maybe these oversimplified represantions of Venice – probably parallel to similar stereotypes of China and the Chinese in Western culture – could have originated not in China but in the lagoon itself.