Pope's Venetian visit to Spotlight Biennale's Prison Exhibition and Engage with Artists, Inmates

The city risks not being a city anymore it risks being a cultural offering, an open-air museum. Moraglia said Francis visit the first by a pope to the Biennale was a welcome boost, especially for the women of the Giudecca prison who participated in the exhibit as tour guides and as protagonists in some of the artworks.These are places of sadness, of suffering, and for these people to have someone of global importance like the pope come to Venice to see them, is a real and concrete encouragement, he said.

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. But even for a place that prides itself on its culture of unusual encounters, Pope Francis' visit Sunday stood out.

Francis travelled to the lagoon city to visit the Holy See's pavilion at the Biennale contemporary art show and meet with the people who created it. But because the Vatican decided to mount its exhibit in Venice's women's prison, and invited inmates to collaborate with the artists, the whole project took on a far more complex meaning, touching on Francis' belief in the power of art to uplift and unify, and of the need to give hope and solidarity to society's most marginalised.

Francis hit on both messages during his visit, which began in the courtyard of the Giudecca prison where he met with the women inmates one by one. As some of them wept, Francis urged them to use their time in prison as a chance for "moral and material rebirth''. "Paradoxically, a stay in prison can mark the beginning of something new, through the rediscovery of the unsuspected beauty in us and in others, as symbolised by the artistic event you are hosting and the project to which you actively contribute," Francis said.

Francis then met with Biennale artists in the prison chapel, decorated with an installation by Brazilian visual artist Sonia Gomes of objects dangling from the ceiling, meant to draw the viewer's gaze upward. He urged the artists to embrace the Biennale's theme this year "Strangers Everywhere," to show solidarity with all those on the margins.

"Art has the status of a city of refuge,' a city that disobeys the regime of violence and discrimination in order to create forms of human belonging capable of recognising, including, protecting and embracing everyone," Francis said. The Vatican exhibit has turned the Giudecca prison, a former convent for reformed prostitutes, into one of the must-see attractions of this year's Biennale, even though to see it visitors must reserve in advance and go through a security check. It has become an unusual art world darling that greets visitors at the entrance with Maurizio Cattelan's wall mural of two giant filthy feet, a work that recalls Caravaggio's dirty feet or the feet that Francis washes each year in a Holy Thursday ritual that he routinely performs on prisoners.

Francis' dizzying morning visit, which ended before lunchtime after Mass in St. Mark's Square, represented an increasingly rare outing for the 87-year-old pontiff, who has been hobbled by health and mobility problems that have ruled out any foreign trips so far this year.

But it was also unusual because it came 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 undertook Sunday.

Venetian authorities last week launched a pilot program to charge day-trippers 5 euros ($5.35) apiece on peak travel days. The aim is to encourage them to stay longer or come at off-peak times to cut down on crowds and make the city more livable for its dwindling number of residents.

For Venice's Catholic patriarch, Archbishop Francesco Moraglia, the new tax program is a worthwhile experiment, a potential necessary evil to try to preserve Venice as a livable city for visitors and residents alike.

"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." Moraglia said Francis' visit — the first by a pope to the Biennale — was a welcome boost, especially for the women of the Giudecca prison who participated in the exhibit as tour guides and as protagonists in some of the artworks.

"These are places of sadness, of suffering, and for these people to have someone of global importance like the pope come to Venice to see them, is a real and concrete encouragement," he said. "And there's a message also to the city and to civil society: that those who make a mistake must pay, but they cannot be forgotten." Moraglia acknowledged that Venice over the centuries has had a long, complicated, love-hate relationship with the papacy, despite its central importance to Christianity.

The relics of St. Mark — the top aide to St. Peter, the first pope — are held here in the basilica, which is one of the most important in all of Christendom. Several popes have hailed from Venice — in the past century alone three pontiffs were elected after being Venice patriarchs. Venice hosted the last conclave held outside the Vatican: the 1799-1800 vote that elected Pope Paul VII.

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.

"It's a history of contrasts because they were two competitors for so many centuries," said Giovanni Maria Vian, a church historian and retired editor of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano whose family hails from Venice. "The papacy wanted to control everything, and Venice jealously guarded its independence." Moraglia said that troubled history is long past and that Venice was welcoming Francis with open arms and gratitude, in keeping with its history as a bridge between cultures, even opposing ones.

"The history of Venice, the DNA of Venice — beyond the language of beauty and culture that unifies — there's this historic character that says that Venice has always been a place of encounter,'' he said.

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