Acqua e cibo a Venezia: Storie della laguna e della citta , a Visualizing Venice exhibition in the Ducal Palace, Venice, opened on September 26 and runs through February 2016. Kristin Love Huffman, instructor in Art, Art History & Visual Studies, coordinated the section on banquets, parades, and festivals and contributed the essay, “Banchetti, parate, giochi e feste” to the catalogue.



The exhibition vividly illustrates how Venice, a city built on the brackish waters of a lagoon, required unique forms of water management and food provisioning for residents and visitors. The dynamic movement of food and water within Venice proper and among the islands of the lagoon is exhibited in five different sections, each of which has a variety of objects (maps, paintings, sculptures) alongside multi-media installations to animate and reconstruct these hidden or lost aspects of the city. Such celebratory occasions provided opportunities for the Venetian state to showcase elaborate displays of food, parades, and festivals, most often involving magnificent state-sponsored ceremony and ritual.