“Wherever I lay my hat, there is my home,” sang Marvin Gaye: the same way. wherever Venice placed a Lion of Saint Mark, that place was the domain of the Serenissima.
Udine knows something about it, given that in Piazza Libertà alone – the most Venetian of mainland squares – three survived, having escaped the fury of the so-called “leontoclastìa”.
The installation of the winged symbol of the patron saint was in fact so systematic and massive that in the areas that freed themselves from the Dominant or fell under other sovereignties, the desire to destroy these symbols of an indigestible power often prevailed.
Udine is, together with Vicenza, the place where the most have been spared: this is told to us by the refined and elegant pen of Alessandro Marzo Magno who tells of his hunt for The Lions of Venice in a very enjoyable reading text that the Library of the Image has released in bookstores for San Marco.
It is 170 pages of easy consultation which in a sort of “historical safari” allows us to explore all the places where Venetian hegemony has left its mark.
The author precisely traces the surviving lions and also reconstructs the work of destruction that was perpetrated especially in the Napoleonic era (or in the Tito era, if we also refer to the Istrian and Dalmatian localities) to the detriment of these dogal icons, the whose origin is more recent than what is believed.
The first lion of which we have information dates back to 1261: Marzo Magno in fact tells us that in previous centuries the saint was represented with human features, but his feline version was adopted only after the loss of the territories of the Eastern Latin Empire which Venice had conquered with the Fourth Crusade in 1204.
Since then, however, it has been the true “brand” of the Serenissima, the unmistakable badge of the primacy of the Republic, loved and hated with the same intensity.
It can still be found in many places from Lombardy to Crete, from the Peloponnese to Dalmatia, from Istria to Cyprus.
They can even be found in Zurich, where they arrived as a tribute to the contribution of the Swiss militiamen in the Gradisca War (1615-1617), and in Warsaw, on a building in the old city; they also stand out in Ukraine, in a residence overlooking the square of Lviv, and also in Russia, on the Sea of Azov, at the mouth of the Don, where the tombstone of the Venetian consul in Tana (now Novocherkassk) comes to mark Marc’s presence 2800 kilometers from Venice.
Friuli preserves several of them: the last one was found in 2020 in Valvasone, but Marzo Magno records them in Pordenone, in Sesto al Reghena, and obviously in Udine.
Although the Venetian domination of Trieste lasted very short, they can also be found here: and thirteen months of dominion of the Serenissima over Gorizia were enough to have the lion sculpted which today stands at the entrance to the Castle, even if it was previously found elsewhere and it was placed there only after the Italian conquest in 1919.
The case of Palmanova, then, is extremely eloquent: when Napoleon conquered it and ordered all the lions to be chiselled away from the city, the palmarini tired of the harassment of the Venetian garrisons were so zealous that of the myriad specimens present in the starry city they barely survived. a couple.
The elegant and enveloping writing of Marzo Magno, in addition to the vastness of the references and the documentary apparatus, gives this book the character of a precious map in search of a fundamental part of the past not only of these lands, but of the entire Mediterranean.
The taste of the anecdote, never an end in itself and always functional to the story, makes these lions so alive that it seems like we hear their roar again, as if they were ready to spread their claws again on the lands that saw them reign for centuries.
