Pope visits Venice to speak to artists and inmates and finds city taxing day-trippers

Gondolas passes in front of a 170-meter long floating bridge set up on the occasion of the Pope Francis' visit in Venice, Italy, Saturday, April 27, 2024. Pope Francis will visit the lagoon city on Sunday, April 28. Venice has always been a place of contrasts, of breathtaking beauty and devastating fragility, where history, religion, art and nature have collided over the centuries to produce an otherworldly gem of a city.

The Vatican exhibit has turned the convent-prison into one of the must-see attractions of this year’s Biennale, an unusual art world darling that greets visitors at the entrance with Maurizio Cattelan’s wall mural of two giant filthy feet. The work, titled “Father,” recalls Caravaggio’s dirty feet or the feet that Francis washes each year in a Holy Thursday ritual that he routinely performs on prisoners.

But it’s also unusual because it comes as Venice, sinking under rising sea levels and weighed down by the impact of overtourism, is in the opening days of an experiment to try to limit the sort of day trips that Francis is undertaking. “Venice has to be defended as a polis, as a city,” Moraglia said in an interview on the eve of Francis’ visit. “The city risks not being a city anymore; it risks being a cultural offering, an open-air museum.”

In fact, one of the exhibits in the prison is a neon sign on the inner courtyard, by the artistic collective Claire Fontaine, that reads: “Siamo con voi nella notte” . But for centuries before that, relations between the independent Venetian Republic and the Papal States were anything but cordial as the two sides dueled over control of the church. Popes in Rome issued interdicts against Venice that essentially excommunicated the entire territory. Venice flexed its muscles back by expelling entire religious orders, including Francis’ own Jesuits.

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