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Oasis in the bedlam of Venice

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  • Oasis in the bedlam of Venice

    The Times (London)
    February 12, 2011 Saturday
    Edition 1;
    National Edition


    Oasis in the bedlam of Venice;
    City break Take a tip from Byron and head for two of the city's
    lesser-known islands, writes Nigel Richardson

    by Nigel Richardson

    In the early 19th century a Venetian called Mattio Lovat crucified
    himself, an act that got him committed to the local mental hospital on
    the island of San Servolo. These days you don't have to go to such
    lengths to gain admittance to San Servolo. You just hop across from
    Venice on a waterbus - a ten-minute ride - and buy a ticket.

    The old hospital, which closed in 1978, houses the Museo del
    Manicomio, the Museum of the Insane Asylum, which tells the story of
    Lovat and the other unfortunates incarcerated here over a period of
    250 years. Surrounding the old buildings are former convent gardens
    that make the perfect spot to have a picnic.

    You can do San Servolo in a couple of hours, a brief but brilliant
    antidote to the tourist bedlam that is Venice, but I'd recommend that
    you prolong the adventure.

    For San Servolo is next to another fascinating lagoon island, San
    Lazzaro, the site of an Armenian monastery where Lord Byron stayed in
    1816 that offers guided tours in the afternoons.

    The islands lie five minutes apart on the No 20 waterbus line and it
    is amazing that the Venice tourist office has not thought to market
    San Servolo and San Lazzaro as a double-whammy of offbeat excursions.
    But they haven't, and visitors have the islands pretty much to
    themselves.

    Since Venice was first settled, the islands of the lagoon have lent
    themselves to religious, punitive or medical uses. Some were refuges
    for lepers and plague victims. San Servolo itself was a convent, then
    a military hospital, before taking in the deranged of Venice and
    northern Italy.

    Its first mentally ill patient, admitted in 1725, was a Venetian
    nobleman, "the most illustrious Mr Lorenzo Stefani", but the strangest
    case was surely that of Mattio Lovat. A diagram in the museum, which
    is housed in a portion of the old hospital premises, shows lots of
    ropes and pulleys to illustrate how he may have pulled off the
    difficult feat of autocrocifissione.

    These were unenlightened times and the treatment of the San Servolo
    patients seems to have been confined to containment and subjugation.
    Objects on display include "Patrizi's volumetric papier-mché gloves",
    which were something like prototype lie-detector devices, a shower
    cage that spurted cold water to "calm the fury" and a Convulsor
    machine for administering electric shocks. More benignly, the
    apothecary's shop, dating from 1719, supplied the hospitals of the
    Venetian Republic and provided low-cost medicines for the poor of the
    city.

    Lord Byron would doubtless have been fascinated by San Servolo, and by
    the case of Mattio Lovat in particular, but they just missed each
    other. Lovat died in the Manicomio in 1806. Ten years later Byron
    turned up at the monastery on San Lazzaro, 200 yards south across the
    lagoon, to study the fiendishly difficult Armenian language. The room
    where he worked, which now contains an Egyptian mummy complete with
    head and extracted brain, is included in a guided tour of the
    cloisters, church, refectory and libraries.

    Byron said that his trips to the Armenian monastery were a
    "divertissement" from Venice itself, where the poor man had trouble
    keeping his trousers on. Together with San Servolo, San Lazzaro still
    makes the perfect divertissement - an afternoon out with the mad, bad
    and dangerous to know, and back in time for Bellinis.

    Need to know

    Take waterbus line 20 from the stop at San Zaccaria (Monumento) on the
    Riva degli Schiavoni. The Museo del Manicomio must be booked in
    advance by calling 0039 041 524 0119; a guide will meet you there;
    admission ¤3 per person for minimum group size of five (ie, just two
    people would pay ¤7.5 each). Daily tours of the Armenian Monastery
    start at 3.30pm, no booking required; admission ¤6. Waterbus times may
    be subject to change, so check, but I would suggest taking the 13.10
    to San Servolo, picking up the 15.20 from there to San Lazzaro and
    returning to San Zaccaria on the 16.45 or 17.25. For the monastery
    only, take the 15.10 from San Zaccaria.




    From: A. Papazian
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