Word: verona
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...inevitably invited retaliation. In the Italian city states of the Renaissance, of course, the Medicis, Viscontis and Sforzas practiced murder against rivals in politics, love or family quarrels with satanic ardor. The first and possibly the worst was Ezzel-ino da Romano, the 13th century despot of Padua and Verona. "Here for the first time," wrote Historian Jacob Burckhardt, "the attempt was openly made to found a throne by wholesale murder and endless barbarities." Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), with his children Cesare and Lucrezia, used assassination for political ends when they eliminated the son of the King of Naples...
...Italian sculptor, David Ciavarella, who flew to the event from Verona to gain artistic inspiration for a sculpture of the stunt, seemed despondent. "It is too confusing for artistic abstraction," he said. "There is no division between farce and drama here. Madness...
...prefer a Rinascimento Romeo to a Risorgimento one. But first love, youthful rambunctiousness and the generation gap (a favorite theme with Shakespeare, as witness Lear, Cymbeline, Othello, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest among others) are universal, and Kahn's choice is perfectly defensible. Shakespeare specified a Verona summer. In 1866, Verona, the episcopal see of the Venetia region abutting Austria, was a hotbed of turmoil, a pawn in the seven-week Austro-Prussian War, during which it was finally ceded by Austria to Italy...
...fleshing out the scheme through having the Chorus speak Sonnets 116 and 55 later on, as further commentary on the play. At other times, the strawhatted, bespectacled Chorus (the reliable Philip Kerr) wanders in and out, or leans against a column reading a newspaper--a silent observer of Verona life. A felicitous solution...
...same effect: it up dates the costumes and jarringly displaces the Elizabethan line. Kahn claims to have based his 1866 version on Luigi Visconti's film, The Leopard. But it lacks any trace of the rich textures of the Visconti settings. No one could look at this tacky Verona for a moment and call it "fair...