Il bestiario medievale di Venezia. Animali e creature fantastiche nella città dei dogi

Venice, during the Middle Ages, was populated with animals, depicted both on the walls of churches and palaces and inside them, but above all in the open air, in the calli, in the fields, on the patere, thus weaving a web that, when unravelled, tells myths and stories that reveal the identity of the city and its people. These images functioned as moral tales or as apotropaic tools, to ward off nefarious events. From the ‘oriental’ bestiary on the floor mosaics of S. Ilario, the emblem of Venice's origins, to the columns of piazzetta S. Marco, with the famous lion and dragon of S. Teodoro, to the nefarious sirens, terrible dragons, majestic eagles, snails, cunning foxes and gullible roosters, to the camel of Palazzo Mastelli and the fable of the fox and the crane, Venice reveals during the Middle Ages a very close connection with the animal world and its moralised representation. It is the result of the relationship between the people and the lagoon environment that imposes precise, and unique, rules of coexistence. With the car drawings that draw a sort of symbolic map of the creatures that inhabit Venice, the stories of medieval Venice emerge.