The Silent Campo (Campo Essay)
Corte Seconda Del Milion. This is the campo Marco Polo was thought to live near. While it is not the most ornate campo, it spoke to me in its intimateness, being a small campo with high walls and no open streets leading from it, meaning you can only enter by entering under an archway. This made the campo feel more like a large room or private garden than most other campi in the city.
Corte Seconda del Million is a
large outdoor room, surrounded by high brick walls and with three exits. Each
exit is only a small opening and is arched over on one of these exits. The
entire campo is covered in blind arcades, which seem to be less for an architectural
purpose and more due to the history of the buildings. For example, there are
several of these blind arcades on the west side of the campo and while two are
fully blind, the other two are filled in with normal windows inside that match
the other rectangular windows. These original arcades are ogee arches and thus
replacing the window is likely difficult and a rectangular window was placed
instead over time. Tondos exist between each of these ogee arches depicting several
animals each in a symmetric pattern. Many of the windows are boarded up and
there is a false balcony. The restaurant on the east side has a doric column. There
are string courses along the roof of the west building, as well as the south
building. The most notable part of the campo is on the north side with three Romanesque
arches. The bays between each arch mimic the build’s materials, being brick and
plastered brick, and the piers supporting the arches are covered in graffiti. One
of the arches is particularly elaborate with tondos covering the extrados and
intrados of the arch. This design on the extrados is formed by a series of
white curved bricks, which results in the pattern being broken whenever a new
brick starts. The intrados has a more consistent pattern as the bricks here
were lined up properly as to keep the pattern consistent. In the pendentive
between these tondos are trefoils extending out from the tondo on the left. Above
this arch is a cross that has more tondos inside it with an additional tondo
off each end of the cross. A lone tondo of a bird is to the left of this cross.
Well Corte Seconda del Million is not the most ornate campo, it was the most
enclosed with no gaps in its walls, giving it a unique feeling from the other
campi.
I sat in a small corner of the
campo for a little under an hour trying to follow Geertz’s example and be “nonpersons,
specters, invisible men” (56) as I observed the surroundings. Corte Seconda Del
Milion acts in a weird way. It is mostly empty, but occasionally gets filled by
a tour group eager to see where Marco Polo lived or has a local, who walks with
much more purpose in his movements, who uses it as a passage to elsewhere in
the city. Most of the other campi acted as a town square for their inhabitants.
The small-town USA is setup in a similar manner to any campo in the city. There
is a wide-open space for people to meet, a communal center (a church or courthouse
for the US and always a church for Venice), and several shops. It is a
gathering place that is what makes people attracted to the notion of a small
town in the US. Most of the other campo reflected this and were lively with
children or shoppers milling about. This was starkly different from this campo,
which either swung wildly to accommodate tourists or acted a secret passageway
for locales. Because this space was both famous (for being related to Marco
Polo) as well as hidden, it attracted both kinds of people. Because the space
was enclosed and the surrounding buildings in disrepair, the campo lost its
attraction and no longer acted as a destination that kept people there. It was no
longer a medieval space, a “space of emplacement” like every other campo in the
city but ceased to be a space at all and “was no longer anything but a point in
its movement” (Foucault 23). It is odd because the space still feels medieval,
with its enclosed wall structure and maintained architecture, but well the campo
was theoretically a medieval space, a heterotopia “linked to slices of time,” (Foucault
26) it was now a secret tourist attraction and passageway to other more
friendly campi. Of course, I could have just gotten bad data and the campo
might still be a gathering place for locales, but from what I saw, this campo
was different from most of the others by becoming less and less of a
destination. To me, this space felt enclosed and warm, but it certainly lacked
the life that many other campi held, which is why I choose to analyze it.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. "Of
Other Spaces." Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.
Geertz, Clifford. "Deep
Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Daedalus 134.4 (2005): 56-86.
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